If you connection is a dirt cheap DSL, don't expect it to be classed the same as a leased line. Many AUPs ban you from running servers on DSL lines anyway dont they?
You get what you pay for at the end of the day.
And as someone else pointed out, If Aol want to deny you mail, they have every right to.
Some people are talking here about how you keep the data for long periods of time accessible etc...its not hard...
Digital data lasts for ever if you maintain it right, with no decay. If you record to CD today, put in a case and keep it on a shelf in a stable temperature and humidity, then at the very least it will last around 30 years. So long as you copy it off to another medium it makes no odds. And OK so CD-ROM will eventually be obsolete, so you copy it to DVD, and from DVD to whatever next. The data is completely irrespective of the media you choose to store it on. Digital data offers FAR more futureproofing than analogue ever could.
As for the fact that there are no readers left, i find this surprising considering how much cool antique hardware geeks like to give a good home to, there must have been hundreds or thousands of these machines at schools around the country in the UK.
As bitter as that post was I agree completely with everything you say. I'm rapidly coming to the conclusion that the whole world is run by incompetent idiots, yet as you say, the rich get richer...
People who actually do the work, or have a conscience get shafted.
When I got my first 33Mhz 486, it was blisteringly fast and ran Windows 3.1 like a dream. All was good in my world.
When I moved to Win95, it became slow, but usable. Then as software evolved, the software started grinding the machine slower and slower.
Netscape 2 was OK, 3.0 too an age to laod, and by the time 4 was out its was dire and slow. When I got the new version of Eudora it couldn't keep up with my typing. Neither could Netscape's mail client.
This I decided was horrific - how can a 486 with 33 million cycles per second to burn not be able to render a few characters per second to the screen???
By the time I had a P200Mhz those problems were forgotten. All was good again. Except for Java which made my PC feel like that old 486 again.
Thing is I still have that P200 so out of date I am, and in the latest version of Word it can't keep up with my typing once again. Many other pieces of software now run pretty cripplingly slow, and i'm not talking fancy graphics programs or anything.
So when one day my P4 2Ghz can't keep up with my typing...again i'll sigh...:(
Compression in these sort of devices is already good. You can't compare like for like. DivX is aimed at compressing high resolution, large bitstream files. Most people dont understand anything about compression algorithms and expect them to bend the laws of physics. Compression algorithms are not processors, and they do not double in compression every 18months.
So how do you wanna split your 33.6K?
Give 8K to audio maybe? Quality will be inferior to a normal phone, but not too bad with a state of the art codec. Ok, so we have 25.6Kbit left for video. Do you seriously think you can do much useful with that?
Add into that, that a modem adds quite a bit of latency, and the codecs will add some too, and you're dropping the perceivable quality again.
In my humble opinion, video phones will never be good until they use a digital line as standard, and the bitrate is at least 128Kbit.
and the only reason you get 53K on POTS is cos 56K modems are anlogue on one side and digital at the ISP end.. that's why you only get 33.6 if two 56K modems connect to each other. The ISP dont have a modem, they receive a digital stream - meaning you can cut out a D/A conversion step.
Normally a modem to modem connection, on a digital exchange would look like:
yourhouse A -> D ----- D --- A -- ISP
with a 56K modem it goes
yourhouse A -> D -------- ISP
and I agree with what others have said, you're never gonna get good quality video/audio with POTS - yet DSL isn't standard enough. If ISDN had taken off I doubt we'd have a problem..oh well..
ASP/PHP/CGI pages will go down a lot quicker cos they're not 'dumb' html pages - every hit means somebody's box has to do a load of backend processing. Static HTML pages will stay up a lot longer, cos the box should have no problem serving them up to the max bandwidth of the line.
I think it would be polite if they told small site owners they were gonna be slashdotted, cos for example, if I knew that, i'd quickly move my content offsite (from my cable modem hosted site), to another site I have on a major ISP that could handle a slashdotting.
This is fantasy stuff. They've been saying this since SGI first made it big. The only outcome I ever saw from that, were craply done CG puppets acting as virtual presenters, in cheaply made kids TV programs. Then they went out of fashion..quickly.
Only geeks would think the idea of replacing hollywood actors with CG was a cool/viable idea.
When these people grow up they may actually gain a taste in films that have quality acting instead of this Summer's cheesy blockbuster, at which point they may realise how they'll never make quality films with CG actors. They'll probably make a heap of low budget trash with the technology though.
The fact CG is getting cheaper is no surprise, all it will do is become a commodity in TV programs, and the result you will see is that naff TV shows on low budgets will have access to the technology, and continue to produce naff TV products.
This is just like consumer technologies - when they first come out, they cost a fortune, and are made beautifully by top class manufacturers, ten years later, and you can by the same technology, for $10 made in some cheap brightly coloured plastic by some slave paid $0.01 an hour in China whose husband beats her with a stick when she gets home. (Ok...I made up the bit about the stick)
Ok, so call me skeptical, but the advantages of digital are most often going to be convinience and cost compared to analogue mediums, with quality as a secondary concern.
Here in the UK we've all been convinced about how great digital TV is and why we should switch to it (it seems the hidden agenda is that analogue gets turned off in about 2010 and presumably the gov will sell the bandwidth). Ok, so the contrast is sharp, but stand anywhere near the TV and the artifacts are awful. I watched a BBC transmission the other week where the artifacts were way worse than MPEG1, and I could see them cleary from the couch.
DVDs are pretty good, and clearly better than VHS, but even so, depending on the film, some are encoded better than others.
Similarly if Music companies ever drop the idea of the CD as a distribution method and go for online music distribution, then we'll all be faced with some crappy low-bitrate music that the average drone thinks sounds 'CD Quality'.
Digital Cinema is just another part of the trend. Now we have to put up with low-resolution compressed video while being told its better quality.
I think everyone seems to remember things being worse than they were. I dont have analogue TV anymore, cos some little bast*** kids cut our antenna wire, but when watching it recently at my dads, I was amazed at how much better it was than digital. Similarly, I've got a stack load of viynl, and on any well looked after record, its very difficult to hear scratches or pops.
Anyway, as ususual, consumers will all buy into it, and lose out as a result.
Population is pretty dense here in the UK, but we still lag way behind the rest of Europe for BB connections. The main issue seems to be BT (who once had the monopoly in the UK) being very slow to let companies in a deregulated market have access to DSL via their exchanges. I live in a cabled area, which tends to be very competive when compared to DSL. Large parts of the UK don't have cable though.
In my area, we're pretty lucky, we all have fibre to the doorstep via cable, as the co-ax they put down a decade or so ago started to rot, and rather than replace it with more co-ax they replaced with fibre, making my humble backwater town, at the time, the most advanced metropolitan area network in the world for a short period.
Also, population spread in Sweden is very thin, yet they have probably the best broadband in Europe.
Ok, so it was a novelty item then and now, but even with its pocket receiver, it's still an amazing item for its time. Most electronics look obsolete less than a year after they're introduced - this baby still looks cutting edge today (well it does if you pretend the receiver wasn't there!)
I remember as a kid when I got my first radio watch, and I was in love with it. Big ugly cheap thing, which could only pick up one band (medium wave) and its sensitivity was so poor that it could only pick up one local station that was very strong.
I have a friend in Sweden with this sort of connection. His apartment block shares 10Mbit and it would appear that he is the only person using it. His connection goes from his apartment down into the basement where its plugged into a switch. The switch has a 10Mbit fibre transceiver and a fibre cable which dissapears off to the telco through a pipe.
His ISP is also quite happy to give as many IPs as he wants on his subnet. Add a new machine, and its DHCP just allocates you another address.
I remember when he first told me he had broadband, and I said, "What type" and he said "Ethernet" and I said "No, which type of broadband have you got - not what your internal network is" (thinking he was being dumb), and he said "No, really, its 10Mb ethernet!"
Yeah lets change time to metric, so that we can go through another Y2K scenario again...great idea.
Mind you, it might create some jobs in the tech industry:D
Re:Moderation is like child abuse for the mind
on
Do You Have The Time?
·
· Score: 1
I don't know who originally wrote that, but wipe the foam off your mouth mate.
It's a shame when someone with an obviously strong command of the English language, and the intelligence needed to write such an article, produces such a paranoid piece of alarmist BS.
Personally alarm bells start to sound in my head whenever I read an article with the word meme or dogma included once too often.
Cool - I didnt know that, but i'm enlightened. I'll go and do some hunting and see if I can get one of my Cable providers' routers to give me time. I always like the elegant solution, and I like the idea of getting my time from the nearest (lowest lag) source.
Currently i'm using a server at BT, which is at least in the UK. I originally posted the message about using Stratum-2 servers, because when first looking into the subject, people seem to target the most obvious servers, like time.nist.gov. If you read the acceptable use for those servers, you should only be using Stratum-1 servers if you're providing time to lots of other people. It doesn't scale well if a million PCs all try to get their time from a main Stratum-1 server.
So ISPs running their own NTPs sounds like a great idea.
I setup my first ntp server about three days ago...
and am using Automachron to sync my PC's clock (which is needed, cos it loses a few minutes every day or so).
People shouldn't automatically use time.nist.gov though...the poor thing will get slashdotted. There are a ton of stratum-2 servers here.
HP Killed PA-RISC? It ain't dead yet. HP recently released specs for the PA-8800 and its slated to beat McKinley into the weeds...their own Itanium processor. The roadmap includes an 8900 processor too.
As for HP being on the Itanium 'bandwagon', Itanium belongs more to HP from a technology standpoint than it does to Intel from what I understand. I can only imagine that HP decided to let Intel take most of the credit for marketing reasons.
I wish my computer would set on fire, then maybe i can get a new one with the insurance payout...and a new house...
I do my best to keep it in a fire-ready state
I wonder if his dad's engine oil invention was "Slick 50" - about as snake oil as it gets.
MS-NBC's Impartial Reporting
on
Microsoft Freon
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
"The Xbox console isn't profitable for the Redmond, Wash., company and its costs are believed to be higher than Sony's, partly because of the hard drive and a version of its powerful Windows operating system included with each machine"
ROFL!!!
Powerful!??? As ever MSNBC continues to show its dedication to impartial, unbiased reporting.
Re:Is anyone else sceptical about this story?
on
Can You Hear Me Now?
·
· Score: 1
Yes i'm skeptical...
First coverage, yeah maybe, but taking GSM as an example he would have to be within ~32KM of a cell as its the max distance IIRC. Maybe that figure is bigger with stuff like CDMA. (Is CDMA analogue?)
Ok maybe he didnt know that could make emergency calls free, but he didn't even TRY??
And then the thing about freezing the phone battery - a natural recharger?? Yeah cos we all put batteries in the freezer as kids didnt we....
And finally wouldnt a blizzard be likely to kill any chance of getting a good signal?
Maybe its true, but the whole thing doesn't sit right with me.
I admit, I havent seen Gnome 2.0 myself, so i'm not that qualified to comment, but i'm coming from a different angle.
Why be so quick to debunk criticism? We're all VERY quick to point at flaws in M$, and other evil empires' software.
As far as i'm concerned criticism is neccesary and healthy. It can be reviewed, considered, and if the result merits changes being made for the benefit of better software for us all, then I am all for it.
I for one am very keen to see Open Source software reach levels that surpass, in every aspect, commercial software. It's going to be a long journey, and if criticism is ignored, we'll never get there.
I don't believe the reviewer was 'having a go', just that they were genuinely dissapointed in a product they WANT to see succeed same as the rest of us.
This seems to be a bigger issue in the US than it is in the UK. Personally I can't actually recall the last time I was in the cinema and someone's phone went off during a film. I remember when it was bad a few years back though. I think the Ad series that Ericsson ran in the Cinema had a large impact..
While the screen was black, they made the sound of someone's phone ringing - to the point that it was VERY realistic, and had people in the cinema groaning in annoyance.
Then the screen said "Dont be a plonker!" then their slogan "Make Yourself Heard" with the addition of (but not for next two hours)
Made all the people who did talk on the phone in the cinema feel like dicks, and was very effective in stopping people doing it.
I can see why AOL would want to do this, seeing as they seem they provide the bandwidth (seemingly for free) to some big streamers like digitallyimported.com who have thousands of unicast streams at 128Kbit.
Never quite seen whats in for them myself, but kudos to them for doing it anyway.
Slashdot Mirror
If you connection is a dirt cheap DSL, don't expect it to be classed the same as a leased line. Many AUPs ban you from running servers on DSL lines anyway dont they? You get what you pay for at the end of the day. And as someone else pointed out, If Aol want to deny you mail, they have every right to.
Some people are talking here about how you keep the data for long periods of time accessible etc...its not hard...
Digital data lasts for ever if you maintain it right, with no decay. If you record to CD today, put in a case and keep it on a shelf in a stable temperature and humidity, then at the very least it will last around 30 years. So long as you copy it off to another medium it makes no odds. And OK so CD-ROM will eventually be obsolete, so you copy it to DVD, and from DVD to whatever next. The data is completely irrespective of the media you choose to store it on. Digital data offers FAR more futureproofing than analogue ever could.
As for the fact that there are no readers left, i find this surprising considering how much cool antique hardware geeks like to give a good home to, there must have been hundreds or thousands of these machines at schools around the country in the UK.
As bitter as that post was I agree completely with everything you say. I'm rapidly coming to the conclusion that the whole world is run by incompetent idiots, yet as you say, the rich get richer...
People who actually do the work, or have a conscience get shafted.
When I got my first 33Mhz 486, it was blisteringly fast and ran Windows 3.1 like a dream. All was good in my world. When I moved to Win95, it became slow, but usable. Then as software evolved, the software started grinding the machine slower and slower. Netscape 2 was OK, 3.0 too an age to laod, and by the time 4 was out its was dire and slow. When I got the new version of Eudora it couldn't keep up with my typing. Neither could Netscape's mail client. This I decided was horrific - how can a 486 with 33 million cycles per second to burn not be able to render a few characters per second to the screen??? By the time I had a P200Mhz those problems were forgotten. All was good again. Except for Java which made my PC feel like that old 486 again. Thing is I still have that P200 so out of date I am, and in the latest version of Word it can't keep up with my typing once again. Many other pieces of software now run pretty cripplingly slow, and i'm not talking fancy graphics programs or anything. So when one day my P4 2Ghz can't keep up with my typing...again i'll sigh... :(
You think you could do you?
Compression in these sort of devices is already good. You can't compare like for like. DivX is aimed at compressing high resolution, large bitstream files. Most people dont understand anything about compression algorithms and expect them to bend the laws of physics. Compression algorithms are not processors, and they do not double in compression every 18months.
So how do you wanna split your 33.6K?
Give 8K to audio maybe? Quality will be inferior to a normal phone, but not too bad with a state of the art codec. Ok, so we have 25.6Kbit left for video. Do you seriously think you can do much useful with that?
Add into that, that a modem adds quite a bit of latency, and the codecs will add some too, and you're dropping the perceivable quality again.
In my humble opinion, video phones will never be good until they use a digital line as standard, and the bitrate is at least 128Kbit.
and the only reason you get 53K on POTS is cos 56K modems are anlogue on one side and digital at the ISP end.. that's why you only get 33.6 if two 56K modems connect to each other. The ISP dont have a modem, they receive a digital stream - meaning you can cut out a D/A conversion step.
Normally a modem to modem connection, on a digital exchange would look like:
yourhouse A -> D ----- D --- A -- ISP
with a 56K modem it goes
yourhouse A -> D -------- ISP
and I agree with what others have said, you're never gonna get good quality video/audio with POTS - yet DSL isn't standard enough. If ISDN had taken off I doubt we'd have a problem..oh well..
ASP/PHP/CGI pages will go down a lot quicker cos they're not 'dumb' html pages - every hit means somebody's box has to do a load of backend processing. Static HTML pages will stay up a lot longer, cos the box should have no problem serving them up to the max bandwidth of the line.
I think it would be polite if they told small site owners they were gonna be slashdotted, cos for example, if I knew that, i'd quickly move my content offsite (from my cable modem hosted site), to another site I have on a major ISP that could handle a slashdotting.
This is fantasy stuff. They've been saying this since SGI first made it big. The only outcome I ever saw from that, were craply done CG puppets acting as virtual presenters, in cheaply made kids TV programs. Then they went out of fashion..quickly.
Only geeks would think the idea of replacing hollywood actors with CG was a cool/viable idea.
When these people grow up they may actually gain a taste in films that have quality acting instead of this Summer's cheesy blockbuster, at which point they may realise how they'll never make quality films with CG actors. They'll probably make a heap of low budget trash with the technology though.
The fact CG is getting cheaper is no surprise, all it will do is become a commodity in TV programs, and the result you will see is that naff TV shows on low budgets will have access to the technology, and continue to produce naff TV products.
This is just like consumer technologies - when they first come out, they cost a fortune, and are made beautifully by top class manufacturers, ten years later, and you can by the same technology, for $10 made in some cheap brightly coloured plastic by some slave paid $0.01 an hour in China whose husband beats her with a stick when she gets home. (Ok...I made up the bit about the stick)
Ok, so call me skeptical, but the advantages of digital are most often going to be convinience and cost compared to analogue mediums, with quality as a secondary concern.
Here in the UK we've all been convinced about how great digital TV is and why we should switch to it (it seems the hidden agenda is that analogue gets turned off in about 2010 and presumably the gov will sell the bandwidth). Ok, so the contrast is sharp, but stand anywhere near the TV and the artifacts are awful. I watched a BBC transmission the other week where the artifacts were way worse than MPEG1, and I could see them cleary from the couch.
DVDs are pretty good, and clearly better than VHS, but even so, depending on the film, some are encoded better than others.
Similarly if Music companies ever drop the idea of the CD as a distribution method and go for online music distribution, then we'll all be faced with some crappy low-bitrate music that the average drone thinks sounds 'CD Quality'.
Digital Cinema is just another part of the trend. Now we have to put up with low-resolution compressed video while being told its better quality.
I think everyone seems to remember things being worse than they were. I dont have analogue TV anymore, cos some little bast*** kids cut our antenna wire, but when watching it recently at my dads, I was amazed at how much better it was than digital. Similarly, I've got a stack load of viynl, and on any well looked after record, its very difficult to hear scratches or pops.
Anyway, as ususual, consumers will all buy into it, and lose out as a result.
Population is pretty dense here in the UK, but we still lag way behind the rest of Europe for BB connections. The main issue seems to be BT (who once had the monopoly in the UK) being very slow to let companies in a deregulated market have access to DSL via their exchanges. I live in a cabled area, which tends to be very competive when compared to DSL. Large parts of the UK don't have cable though.
In my area, we're pretty lucky, we all have fibre to the doorstep via cable, as the co-ax they put down a decade or so ago started to rot, and rather than replace it with more co-ax they replaced with fibre, making my humble backwater town, at the time, the most advanced metropolitan area network in the world for a short period.
Also, population spread in Sweden is very thin, yet they have probably the best broadband in Europe.
Ok, so it was a novelty item then and now, but even with its pocket receiver, it's still an amazing item for its time. Most electronics look obsolete less than a year after they're introduced - this baby still looks cutting edge today (well it does if you pretend the receiver wasn't there!)
I remember as a kid when I got my first radio watch, and I was in love with it. Big ugly cheap thing, which could only pick up one band (medium wave) and its sensitivity was so poor that it could only pick up one local station that was very strong.
His ISP is also quite happy to give as many IPs as he wants on his subnet. Add a new machine, and its DHCP just allocates you another address.
I remember when he first told me he had broadband, and I said, "What type" and he said "Ethernet" and I said "No, which type of broadband have you got - not what your internal network is" (thinking he was being dumb), and he said "No, really, its 10Mb ethernet!"
Funny you should say that...as, aren't all these people Americans?
Yeah lets change time to metric, so that we can go through another Y2K scenario again...great idea. Mind you, it might create some jobs in the tech industry :D
I don't know who originally wrote that, but wipe the foam off your mouth mate.
It's a shame when someone with an obviously strong command of the English language, and the intelligence needed to write such an article, produces such a paranoid piece of alarmist BS.
Personally alarm bells start to sound in my head whenever I read an article with the word meme or dogma included once too often.
Cool - I didnt know that, but i'm enlightened. I'll go and do some hunting and see if I can get one of my Cable providers' routers to give me time. I always like the elegant solution, and I like the idea of getting my time from the nearest (lowest lag) source.
Currently i'm using a server at BT, which is at least in the UK. I originally posted the message about using Stratum-2 servers, because when first looking into the subject, people seem to target the most obvious servers, like time.nist.gov. If you read the acceptable use for those servers, you should only be using Stratum-1 servers if you're providing time to lots of other people. It doesn't scale well if a million PCs all try to get their time from a main Stratum-1 server.
So ISPs running their own NTPs sounds like a great idea.
I setup my first ntp server about three days ago... and am using Automachron to sync my PC's clock (which is needed, cos it loses a few minutes every day or so). People shouldn't automatically use time.nist.gov though...the poor thing will get slashdotted. There are a ton of stratum-2 servers here.
Viva la PA-RISC!
I wish my computer would set on fire, then maybe i can get a new one with the insurance payout...and a new house... I do my best to keep it in a fire-ready state
I wonder if his dad's engine oil invention was "Slick 50" - about as snake oil as it gets.
"The Xbox console isn't profitable for the Redmond, Wash., company and its costs are believed to be higher than Sony's, partly because of the hard drive and a version of its powerful Windows operating system included with each machine" ROFL!!! Powerful!??? As ever MSNBC continues to show its dedication to impartial, unbiased reporting.
Yes i'm skeptical... First coverage, yeah maybe, but taking GSM as an example he would have to be within ~32KM of a cell as its the max distance IIRC. Maybe that figure is bigger with stuff like CDMA. (Is CDMA analogue?) Ok maybe he didnt know that could make emergency calls free, but he didn't even TRY?? And then the thing about freezing the phone battery - a natural recharger?? Yeah cos we all put batteries in the freezer as kids didnt we.... And finally wouldnt a blizzard be likely to kill any chance of getting a good signal? Maybe its true, but the whole thing doesn't sit right with me.
I admit, I havent seen Gnome 2.0 myself, so i'm not that qualified to comment, but i'm coming from a different angle.
Why be so quick to debunk criticism? We're all VERY quick to point at flaws in M$, and other evil empires' software.
As far as i'm concerned criticism is neccesary and healthy. It can be reviewed, considered, and if the result merits changes being made for the benefit of better software for us all, then I am all for it.
I for one am very keen to see Open Source software reach levels that surpass, in every aspect, commercial software. It's going to be a long journey, and if criticism is ignored, we'll never get there.
I don't believe the reviewer was 'having a go', just that they were genuinely dissapointed in a product they WANT to see succeed same as the rest of us.
This seems to be a bigger issue in the US than it is in the UK. Personally I can't actually recall the last time I was in the cinema and someone's phone went off during a film. I remember when it was bad a few years back though. I think the Ad series that Ericsson ran in the Cinema had a large impact..
While the screen was black, they made the sound of someone's phone ringing - to the point that it was VERY realistic, and had people in the cinema groaning in annoyance.
Then the screen said "Dont be a plonker!" then their slogan "Make Yourself Heard" with the addition of (but not for next two hours)
Made all the people who did talk on the phone in the cinema feel like dicks, and was very effective in stopping people doing it.
I can see why AOL would want to do this, seeing as they seem they provide the bandwidth (seemingly for free) to some big streamers like digitallyimported.com who have thousands of unicast streams at 128Kbit. Never quite seen whats in for them myself, but kudos to them for doing it anyway.