Well, their customer service bites the big one, but I'm more than happy with the speed of my 1 meg connection. Maybe it's just the area I'm in, but I consistently get the full bandwidth for downloads, provided the other end of the link can keep up. Zero downtime in the last year that I know of.
Plus, the end-user delivery system has a max theoretical speed of 38 meg I think (provided the infrustructure can handle it). ADSL has technological caps well below this that can't be beaten at the moment. OK, so those speeds are a few years away, but I'm looking ahead.
The cable TV system is quite good too, provided your box doesn't hang on you!
Not all PPV systems require that you make a phone call, or have additional hardware. The UK digital cable system is fully bi-directional; the purchase is done when you want to watch the film. You can also e-mail and order pizza etc over it.
The UK digital satelite system works differently, having a bi-directional satelite is a bit more complex and expensive, so the feed from the user to the service center is over dial-up modem. Your actions are buffered up and sent during the night occassionaly. Sending e-mail and the other interactive services causes the dial-up to come up on demand.
And yes, both systems have the capability to track what you are watching. My cable box has an IP address and gets software updates from my provider now and again, giving new features etc. It's a clever system...
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Depends on whether it's your local branch or not as well. Not that it makes any logistical difference which one you pay it in to, but they'll still sit on it for a day or two, meanwhile it generates interest for them...
Shielding children from "bad things" has always been a bad thing itself. In the UK, alcohol is kept as far away from children as possible, they cannot enter most bars, or never have a glass of wine with a meal at home.
In the rest of Europe, kids are brought up with alcohol around them. Most parents don't object to the odd glass of wine or beer during a meal. Consequently, alcohol is no longer this mystical thing that only grown-ups do, and we know how kids always want to appear more grown up than they are. Teenage drinking here is a much larger problem than the rest of Europe.
The same applies for many other "adult-only" persuits, such as porn. By attempting to keep something away from your children, you'll only make them more curious about it.
Religious people might file this under "forbidden fruit".
It is a sensible law. Naming a child "Hitler" or "Osama Bin Laden" is basically cruelty to children. There is no way a child could have a normal life with a name like that.
What the technology giveth, the technology takes away. Advances in sound recording technology created the recording industry. Advances in digital communitcation removed the need for it.
Jeez, do you see the horse-drawn car makers bitching to the car manufacturers? Progress is progress, and I'll be damned if I am going to go along with halting progress just so a few media companies can make a few bucks.
Since you are a Slashdot reader, we shall presume for the moment that you consider yourself technically adept, which implies that your friends are most likely of a similar demographic.
I'm a geek with mostly non-geek friends. The only folks I know that don't have lots of burned CDs are the ones that don't have CD-burners, and vinyl-loving DJs. And they each have a few burned disks given to them by friends who do. Everyone who has gotten the capability to do this has been doing it for as long as they've had their PC. Many even bought a PC for this purpose.
What will be the telling point will be how technology moves to the people who don't have it. If someone doesn't even have a computer with a burner and have no plans to do so, they're probably not all that interested in digital downloads and DRM anyway.
High-quality recordings (i.e. 128-bit is quite marginal, I'm hoping for 256-bit or at least an option to choose bitrate).
256-kbit is a tad excessive. You should be using VBR, such as the r3mix preset. I've never seen any mp3 files with a better quality/size ratio than those encoded with it. Encoders/rippers such as CDex (windows) and LAME support it. Basically it's a "shortcut" to a whole load of command-line switches that have been through blind listening tests.
And verify that there was someone reading the mail at the other end. Clicking "Remove" is pretty much the worst thing you can do. "Yes, I'm here, and I read all my e-mail, including the SPAM. Please send me more!!"
the actual game code that says what a rocket launcher does, and etc. are still firmly in the hands of Carmack and all.
Well, they are actually in the hands of the original creators, because all they are are ROM dumps from the original arcade machines. The engine itself emulates the hardware of each machine and simply runs the original ROM code. The information on what hardware each game requires is stored in the engine, not the ROMs.
It's more worrying than just cartoons. There are many glaring errors in movies, especially regarding historical events. In the absence of contary personal experience, your own mind automatically assumes that's what happened. That's how we learn. There's quite a large number of people who probably believe that (for example) the USA was the only side fighting the Nazis in WW2, or William Wallace slept with a princess that would have been only 6-7 years old while he was around!
Any teacher who stands up in front of a class and says that Coriolis force determines which way the water flows from a sink or bathtub, should not only read Fraser's Bad Coriolis Web page, but be required to copy it on the blackboard 100 times.
Or, take this much more detailed debunking, containing the following quote:
This is so large that Coriolis forces will be insignificant compared to other fluid phenomena.
Don't take my word for it, look it up yourself...I'm just the messenger;-)
I always thought the spinning water thingy was due to the rotation of the earth. Like the coriolis effect or whatever.
Nope, that's an urban myth. There are dozen different things that control how water drains that have a much greater effect than coriolis. To prove the coriolis effect, you'd need to have completely identical drains, including all the drain pipes, and allow the water many days "to settle" in the tank before pulling the plug.
In the real world, the shape of the sink/tub, the way it flows in the drain, and the motion of the water prior to pulling the plug determine what way it goes. So, Bart was actually right, and not Lisa for once...
An old PC, 160+ Mhz CPU, two network cards and one of the custom-designed linux firewall distributions.
Cheap, highly customisable and constantly getting updated by the linux community. Plus, all PCs on your network get the benefits of the firewall, plus NAT and DHCP automatically.
Ah, that was back when it used the opennap networks. Those days are long gone now, check it out. As I've said in another post, it has much more options than Kazaa and you can really tweak it to get excellent performance, if you know what you are doing.
dedicated and guaranteed 512/256 mb slice of the available bandwidth. You simply AREN'T paying for that
Yes I am. That's what the adverts said. You obviously have to make allowances for occassional slowdowns, but if they advertise that level of service, I expect to get that level of service. How they handle and pay for it behind the scenes is their problem, not mine.
Ditto blocking ports, they shouldn't be advertising it as "Internet Access", because once you start breaking the RFCs, then it's no longer the Internet, just a subset of it.
We do have a right to do what we want, it's supposed to be a free market. If my ISP ever imposes any of these conditions on me, I'll switch to another. There are at least 20 different providers offering broadband in my area. My current ISP is a cable provider, if they lose me, they lose a customer that is paying for digital cable, their "gold" cable modem package, and two telephone lines. Should I ever have to switch, I'll damn sure tell them why. If consumers don't stand up for themselves, they get trampled on.
Companies like Kazaa need to provide better throttling in P2P products
Try WinMx, it has good throttling/limiting options.
My service shouldn't slow to a crawl just because I am using 24kbps of upstream
You could be saturating your upstream, which will always trash your downstream. When downloading a file over TCP, every packet must be confirmed as "ACK'ed", meaning you received the packet correctly. If your upstream is working overtime, these ACK packets get queued, and the download slows as the server lowers the TCP window, which is the number of packets to send before waiting for acknowledgement. This is how the internet handles flow-control.
If you are finding problems, I'd recommend getting a rooter/firewall that can do throttling with traffic shaping. Once you have a system that prioritises ACKs, games and http over the p2p traffic and limits the upstream to 90-95% if your maximum, you should never really notice that p2p is running. In theory.
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Well, their customer service bites the big one, but I'm more than happy with the speed of my 1 meg connection. Maybe it's just the area I'm in, but I consistently get the full bandwidth for downloads, provided the other end of the link can keep up. Zero downtime in the last year that I know of.
Plus, the end-user delivery system has a max theoretical speed of 38 meg I think (provided the infrustructure can handle it). ADSL has technological caps well below this that can't be beaten at the moment. OK, so those speeds are a few years away, but I'm looking ahead.
The cable TV system is quite good too, provided your box doesn't hang on you!
Oh, great. So every time a shuttle gets launched, that's another couple more spy satelites watching me. I feel safer already.
The UK digital satelite system works differently, having a bi-directional satelite is a bit more complex and expensive, so the feed from the user to the service center is over dial-up modem. Your actions are buffered up and sent during the night occassionaly. Sending e-mail and the other interactive services causes the dial-up to come up on demand.
And yes, both systems have the capability to track what you are watching. My cable box has an IP address and gets software updates from my provider now and again, giving new features etc. It's a clever system...
Depends on whether it's your local branch or not as well. Not that it makes any logistical difference which one you pay it in to, but they'll still sit on it for a day or two, meanwhile it generates interest for them...
In the rest of Europe, kids are brought up with alcohol around them. Most parents don't object to the odd glass of wine or beer during a meal. Consequently, alcohol is no longer this mystical thing that only grown-ups do, and we know how kids always want to appear more grown up than they are. Teenage drinking here is a much larger problem than the rest of Europe.
The same applies for many other "adult-only" persuits, such as porn. By attempting to keep something away from your children, you'll only make them more curious about it.
Religious people might file this under "forbidden fruit".
Nice theory, but that's all it will ever be. There is no way you can get every porn site on the planet to move onto it. End of discussion really.
It is a sensible law. Naming a child "Hitler" or "Osama Bin Laden" is basically cruelty to children. There is no way a child could have a normal life with a name like that.
You could have a bot doing it for you. Which is pretty unreasonable really, it's an abuse of what looks to be a nice service.
I wonder if they'll start doing a sliding-scale fee eventially, based on how much you are downloading. Many ISPs are going down this route now...
Jazz is really popular, and I'm sure what you want is out there.
Jeez, do you see the horse-drawn car makers bitching to the car manufacturers? Progress is progress, and I'll be damned if I am going to go along with halting progress just so a few media companies can make a few bucks.
I'm a geek with mostly non-geek friends. The only folks I know that don't have lots of burned CDs are the ones that don't have CD-burners, and vinyl-loving DJs. And they each have a few burned disks given to them by friends who do. Everyone who has gotten the capability to do this has been doing it for as long as they've had their PC. Many even bought a PC for this purpose.
What will be the telling point will be how technology moves to the people who don't have it. If someone doesn't even have a computer with a burner and have no plans to do so, they're probably not all that interested in digital downloads and DRM anyway.
256-kbit is a tad excessive. You should be using VBR, such as the r3mix preset. I've never seen any mp3 files with a better quality/size ratio than those encoded with it. Encoders/rippers such as CDex (windows) and LAME support it. Basically it's a "shortcut" to a whole load of command-line switches that have been through blind listening tests.
Besides, in a few years, when the old analogue system is switched off, you'll have to have this equipment. Why wait?
Oops, missed the transition from Mame to Quake. That will be the the /. "Treaded" view then... ;-)
And verify that there was someone reading the mail at the other end. Clicking "Remove" is pretty much the worst thing you can do. "Yes, I'm here, and I read all my e-mail, including the SPAM. Please send me more!!"
Well, they are actually in the hands of the original creators, because all they are are ROM dumps from the original arcade machines. The engine itself emulates the hardware of each machine and simply runs the original ROM code. The information on what hardware each game requires is stored in the engine, not the ROMs.
Thanks! I'd always wondered about that gag!
Take a look at the other posts in this sub-thread...
It's more worrying than just cartoons. There are many glaring errors in movies, especially regarding historical events. In the absence of contary personal experience, your own mind automatically assumes that's what happened. That's how we learn. There's quite a large number of people who probably believe that (for example) the USA was the only side fighting the Nazis in WW2, or William Wallace slept with a princess that would have been only 6-7 years old while he was around!
What I believe is beside the point...a simple google search for "coriolis effect" reveals:
Quote from usatoday.com:
Any teacher who stands up in front of a class and says that Coriolis force determines which way the water flows from a sink or bathtub, should not only read Fraser's Bad Coriolis Web page, but be required to copy it on the blackboard 100 times.
Or, take this much more detailed debunking, containing the following quote:
This is so large that Coriolis forces will be insignificant compared to other fluid phenomena.
Don't take my word for it, look it up yourself...I'm just the messenger ;-)
Nope, that's an urban myth. There are dozen different things that control how water drains that have a much greater effect than coriolis. To prove the coriolis effect, you'd need to have completely identical drains, including all the drain pipes, and allow the water many days "to settle" in the tank before pulling the plug.
In the real world, the shape of the sink/tub, the way it flows in the drain, and the motion of the water prior to pulling the plug determine what way it goes. So, Bart was actually right, and not Lisa for once...
Cheap, highly customisable and constantly getting updated by the linux community. Plus, all PCs on your network get the benefits of the firewall, plus NAT and DHCP automatically.
Ah, that was back when it used the opennap networks. Those days are long gone now, check it out. As I've said in another post, it has much more options than Kazaa and you can really tweak it to get excellent performance, if you know what you are doing.
Yes I am. That's what the adverts said. You obviously have to make allowances for occassional slowdowns, but if they advertise that level of service, I expect to get that level of service. How they handle and pay for it behind the scenes is their problem, not mine.
Ditto blocking ports, they shouldn't be advertising it as "Internet Access", because once you start breaking the RFCs, then it's no longer the Internet, just a subset of it.
We do have a right to do what we want, it's supposed to be a free market. If my ISP ever imposes any of these conditions on me, I'll switch to another. There are at least 20 different providers offering broadband in my area. My current ISP is a cable provider, if they lose me, they lose a customer that is paying for digital cable, their "gold" cable modem package, and two telephone lines. Should I ever have to switch, I'll damn sure tell them why. If consumers don't stand up for themselves, they get trampled on.
Try WinMx, it has good throttling/limiting options.
My service shouldn't slow to a crawl just because I am using 24kbps of upstream
You could be saturating your upstream, which will always trash your downstream. When downloading a file over TCP, every packet must be confirmed as "ACK'ed", meaning you received the packet correctly. If your upstream is working overtime, these ACK packets get queued, and the download slows as the server lowers the TCP window, which is the number of packets to send before waiting for acknowledgement. This is how the internet handles flow-control.
If you are finding problems, I'd recommend getting a rooter/firewall that can do throttling with traffic shaping. Once you have a system that prioritises ACKs, games and http over the p2p traffic and limits the upstream to 90-95% if your maximum, you should never really notice that p2p is running. In theory.