That's the point, going from encrypted content + key to generalized decryption system is only a matter of time and effort. The more people interested in decrypting the content, the sooner it'll happen. The only possible response for DRM authors is to make new DRM schemes, which will then also be cracked. Since it's impractical for a DRM develpment team to develop new encryption standards and change the market over to them faster than people crack the DRM, it'll never work.
The world already has N variants of MPEG4 for low-bitrate video. How many of these codecs support super ultra high quality video? American HDTV uses MPEG2, and at its current spec it looks like crap. A near-real-time encoding of a football game just looks abominable on ATSC's MPEG2. Can we start striving for an open-source codec with lossless or near lossless quality? How about 10-bit component, 4:2:2 color or better?
I thought of this when I was designing my codec actually.
How about lossless mode? That high enough quality? I've just about got it working now in my code.
How about unlimited resolution? (well maybe limited by unsigned 64bit max) How about independant per channel resolution with no restriction on odd sizes?
How about support for any depth per pixel and unlimited channels? Want do do a VR setup with Y, U, V, alpha, a mask, x2 for seperate interlacing fields, x2 again for stereo vision with 32bits per sample per channel? No problem, just expect alot of memory use on that one. But the code's there and working now.
Just about the only images I can't support in my project right now are true holographic modes, because I've been too lazy to write the 20 lines of code or so to support them without any real need yet. But if you want I could get you holographic support whenever I have an hour or two free.
Things would go alot faster if I could get some help debugging API issues like VFW. Anyone wanting to help out let me know.
Hmm, funny thing is, I've been working on an open source wavelet based video codec for the last four years or so. And even funnier is that I believe if you check over at Doom9, there's yet another one going around there too.
It was still much much easier to get around with the electric assist than without. I had alot of difficulty getting anywhere before and after I had the motor. I'm not a dedicated athlete, I was a college student studying CS at the time. While I did some working out it certainly wasn't enough to keep me in good enough shape to constantly ride up and down the hills in SF.
After awhile you get good at estimating how far you can go without running low on juice. I'd really like to see something with higher energy density like li batteries or fuel cells but it's just not happening. The market is too small for any of the people with that kind of tech to care about. If they were smart they'd develop it and then sell it to China.
Oh and I forgot to mention one technology in the list. A decent system for hydrogen storage. Seriously, this guy has a great idea and it's easy to implement,but nobody seems to be taking him up on it. I'm not sure why.
I had an e-bike for several years.
on
E-bike E-xperiences?
·
· Score: 2, Informative
I had the DX kit from ZAP for several years when I was at college in San Francisco. I had a number of interesting experiences.
I opted for the dual battery kit because the claims of distance on a charge were optimistic by about a factor of two. I'm sure if you were on some ultralight bike riding on perfectly flat roads at low speed you could achieve the rated numbers, but in the real world cranking up twin peaks with both you and the motors straining for all you're worth it was alot shorter.
The motor will become less efficient as it heats up. It will heat up as it has to provide more torque, so it will usually quit right on the steepest hill in your journey about the time you've become too tired to pedal the heavy bike without it. Then you'll walk the rest of the way up.
If you have a friction drive like the zap kit did, where the motor drives the wheel via a roller that rides on the tire, it will be useless anytime the tire is wet, dusty, or you're going up a hill where it produces significant resistance. The solution I found to this was to install an extra gear shift on the handlebars, and run a line down the frame to a point opposite the motor. Then ran the cable to a convenient mounting hole in the motor casing so that when I pulled the lever the motor would be pulled into the tire. This let me keep traction in any condition, even snow. I showed this to some people from zap, and they thought it was great. But not great enough to put in their kits apparently. I also designed a roller that worked kind of like a thick spring that could change diameter with pressure so using this you could change gear ratios, but that never went anywhere either. If anyone wants the design to work on building it, let me know.
It won't electrocute you or short out in the rain, even in El Nino, even if you're stupid and go out in El Nino and get drenched. Your brakes however, will fail when they're hydroplaning on your rims as you careen down into the Noe valley at breakneck speeds.
Bike thieves will still steal your bike despite the fact they don't have the charger for it. Either that or someone will steal your battery and headlight and smash them in the street for no good reason. Kryptonite locks will not save you, it'll still be stolen even in broad daylight at a busy mall. I gave up after losing 2 bikes.
If you have to transport it a long distance, like to another state, don't ship it, fly with it. Most airlines have a flat $50 bike fee, just get a bike box from the local bike shop and pack it. Pack your batteries seperately in your luggage on top, so you can show them to the people at the counter in the airport before they check your bag. Lead acid gel cells are safe for commercial airline trainsport, and will likely have this printed on the batteries themselves, as mine did.
If you use the bike every day expect to replace your batteries every year or two, as they'll wear out.
Beware of other cyclists, alot of them will be mad at you for "cheating".
You'll hear lots of interesting things about better technologies, such as improved lithium ion batteries, and small fuel cells which are always "just around the corner". I waited and searched for 5 years to get either one. Even when they actually demonstrated a bike with the same kit as mine running on a li battery with half the weight and 6 times the range, they wouldn't sell it to me. They went on to make $450 laptop batteries instead and refused to license the tech to anyone interested in other applications and refused to build any other size or shape batteries unless you wanted like 100,000 units. As for the fuel cells, saw one on a bike too. But they were always experimental and "Oh we'll have this out in 2 years." It won't happen anytime soon.
Doesn't the Pentium III have that dreaded CPU identifier built in that's set on by default so people can log and track where you're browsing? Wasn't this supposed to cause the sky to fall in 1999 or something?
If you're looking for alternate history, it's not hard to find.
Try say, S.M. Stirling's Isle in the Sea of Time triology where Nantucket gets sent to the bronze age, or some of his earlier stuff like the Drakkan series where South Africa conquers a big chunk of the world in the 20th century.
Harry Turtledove would also be another place to look. The Worldwar series about aliens invading in 1942 has come pretty close to present day. His other alternate civil war ending series started earlier so is still a few decades behind.
Want something a bit more present day with future stuff? Try A Hymn Before Battle by John Ringo. Some good stuff there if you like power armor and lots of military style stuff. It has a few too many Sluggy Freelance references IMHO though.
William Gibson still has some interesting stuff if you haven't read it. (I'll asume everyone on slashdot has read Neal Stephenson at least) Try The Difference Engine if you want past-future. Though these days neuromancer is almost in that category considering it's a book about the information age written 20 years ago on a manual typewriter.
Have a look here for the book. Yes I bought and read it, during one of those "I'm bored and stuck in an airport's mockery of a decent bookstore, they have to have SOMETHING!" moments. It wasn't horrible. Wasn't great either.
I got it in 1997-1998 or so and it was 10/10 with mutliple IPs for $24.95 a month. Then they forced everyone to move to DOCSIS by turning off support for the other modems and put everyone on 1 up 10 down with 1 IP for $34.95 a month. Then in 2002 or so they decided anyone who "abuses the network" i.e. uploads for more than a hundred megs at a time or so gets capped to 150kbps up and 10m down, permanently. Oh and now it's $49.95 a month I think, or is it moving to $59.95? If not it probably will soon.
On the DSL side, you have Verizon, which is a total nightmare from what I hear. 90k up 640k down PPPOE connections that drop you and force you to redial (REDIAL!?!?) every few hours. My ex had it for awhile, then dropped it for Roadrunner, which is almost reasonable. RCN was talking about these 850mbit non-oversubscribed pipes flowing through the city, but where'd they go?
The problem in the US is twofold. One, the telcos have semi-monopolies and are terrified that people will start running servers on "consumer grade" broadband connections and not want to pay them $600/month for a T-1 slower than most DSL these days. Optonline for example gives you no difference between their base connection and their "business class" OOL. You still have port 80 and 8080 blocked, you're still not legally allowed to run any kind of server, etc. If you call them and bitch they send you over to Lightpath which wants to charge you 4-5 digits a month for some fiber connection.
The second half of the problem is the people are ignorant. Nobody wants a 100M line to watch HDTV because they don't know more than "HDTV GOOD!" and so they go out to the mall and buy a HDTV. Wait, did I say an HDTV? I mean an HDTV READY TV. You know, in case we ever actually GET HDTV. Which is unlikely because people go "Look I've got an HDTV LOOK HOW GREAT IT IS!" while watching a standard DVD or sattelite feed and not knowing there's supposed to be better quality than that. The prosumer and videophile market who know what they're buying get to pay $100+/month to cable and sattelite for a few HDTV channels that actually work sometimes.
I find alot of things that are "USB powered" aren't. They usually need two ports and even then depend on out of spec power levels. For example, my Lacie 4x slimline DVD writer can't draw enough power from the two USB ports on my Toshiba M200. I tried a d-link USB2 card that was supposedly rated at 500ma per port (The spec maximum) but either that's not enough power or the Toshiba doesn't deliver enough power to the card. There's just no way to get it to work. On my desktop, plug it into 2 USB ports and it works fine.
I'm debating either getting a small lightweight UPS around 300VA or if I'm better off cutting up some USB device or cable and wiring in a 4AA holder to put batteries in.
...that we're now seeing quantifiable limits of how much information you could possibly consume in your lifetime, and the possibility of storing it all locally? It's kinda upsetting when you can measure your lifespan in amount of media consumed, it seems shorter somehow. Though I wonder if I can use the excuse "Sorry my playlist is already set for the next 50 years." to avoid watching another crappy movie my ex has picked out.:P
This reminds me of the SpaceOrb. I tried one, hated it, and returned it. Why? It just didn't have the precision of a mouse or joystick.
Likewise, I learned to type on a dvorak keyboard. I don't anymore. Why? Let's see.
1. Finding a programmable keyboard can be expensive or irritating. Fortunately I found some old Gateway Anykeys that still worked for $10 each.
2. Relearning to type. This took me about a month to get past 1/4 of my existing typing speed (30wpm vs 120wpm).
3. Lack of portability. This was the real killer. It wasn't typing on MY keyboard that became irritating, it was typing on OTHER PEOPLE'S keyboards that did. Because I'd have to switch back over to qwerty again to do any work on any other system at a job or at a friend's house or for my parents etc.
I did find my hands were much less tired, so I assume were I a chronic RSI sufferer, I'd consider putting up with the inconvenience. But short of hauling my own custom keyboard around, there's no solution to the pain of having to re-adapt every time you go somewhere else. Are people going to carry this thing with them and hook it up to friends/coworkers/bosses/clients computers to do work? I doubt it.
That's odd, I get similar results even using the DMZ IP adress on my router for the machine d/ling the torrent. Torrents are routinely slower than sites for me. I was getting around 14k/s on the torrent, 230k/s from MS on this one. I've had torrents exceed 200k/s but rarely. I regularly have websites exceed 700k/s. Any other possible reasons bittorent sucks? I'm fairly sure it's not a lack of connections, I regularly manage a couple hundred easy.
If you're really looking for "backup" as in something you can dump your data to and then secure, your best bet is to build a machine from lowend parts.
Consider the Gigabyte 7NNXP motherboard. I have one. It has 4 IDE ports and 2 SATA ports. That's 10 drives worth of controller right there. Take one, throw it in a cheap case with many bays. I see an 11 bay case, 7 3.5 and 4 5.25 on pricewatch for $20 + 7.95 shipping with a 400W power supply. More than adequate.
Figure a cheap CPU, say a $50 Athlon XP, maybe less if you scrounge one, and some cheap RAM, $50 gets you about 512MB these days, and again you might even have some lying around. Throw any junk video card in you want. $50 worth of video card and you could even be playing Doom3 at medium quality on this thing, the power you get per dollar is ridiculous these days.
The motherboard has gigabit ethernet built in. Just hook it up to your machine, use vinum or whatever to raid the drives and have it rsync your files to the HDs, and you're set. Then take the entire machine and PUT IT AWAY. Like say someplace that won't be affected if the house floods or burns down.
So let's tally up the cost here: $170 motherboard $30 case (shipped) $50 CPU $50 memory $50 video card?
That's $350 total. Guess what, a 4 port 3ware STARTS around $350. You might get a last-generation 8port for $350, and an 8port RaidCore card also goes for $350. Plus this setup has a cpu impact of zero, it doesn't clutter your main case with drives and cables, and you can use it as a spare machine in case your primary goes down, just throw an emergency boot partition on the 2TB of space or so it'll have.
The remaining cost is just how much you're willing to spend on drives. But you still haven't spent more than a typical highend RAID controller and you've got way more processing power and flexibility.
I've had a 10mbit downstream from optimum online since 1997 or 1998. I've rarely needed more downstream as most sites can't push anywhere near that. Even a big server like ATI or Nvidia's driver hosting can barely hit 6mbps to me, even with TCP recieve window tweaks.
When are we going to see decent upstream at the home? 128kbps doesn't cut it. I rarely see any offering at all over 256kbps upstream. OOL offers 1024 but as soon as you begin actually USING it they cap you back to 150 to keep the network from congesting to death.
But Joe McSixpack doesn't care about that, he just wants to grab porn faster and maybe let his kids get on aol and watch some crappy realvideo trash without whining. The ISPs are so paranoid about people running servers on their networks and losing their ability to charge 5000% markup for the same connection for "business" users even though they still block ports like 80 and 25. Woe betide the industry if people realised that 1.5mbps T-1 they've been paying hundreds or thousands a month for since the early 90s is now SLOW.
It's gotten to the point where I've pretty much given up hope of ever seeing a real broadband connection in my lifetime. By the time I can afford something with decent upstream, the idiots in washington will have ISPs so paranoid that everyone will be mandatorily placed behind a NAT and their servers will continually portscan you looking for servers and p2p apps.
Actually it's a gene involving taste receptors on the tounge. I can still smell it just fine. And no it doens't make my urine tasteless, it just means I can't taste the urea in mine or others, it tastes just like water unless something's wrong with it.
Actually we did gene testing in AP bio by normal observations (not blood tests or anything). One of the tests involved putting a piece of paper on your tounge. The teacher didn't tell us what it was beforehand, turns out it was treated with synthetic urea. To me it tasted just like paper, everyone else ran for the sink to throw up.
I also found out by accident that it does apply to real urine too, but that was a rather long story that happened later in college.
It really doesn't appeal to me at all as a drinkable substance (as I can still smell it and it stinks) but if I had to deal with it I'd live.
Perhaps you've missed AMD's introduction of the HE and EE series opterons, which have rated outputs of 55W and 30W respectively. It seems like low heat output is quickly becoming the new Mhz. When your transistor budget is so much more than what your logic requires, you can always throw another pipeline or even an entire extra cpu core on the die for more performance, but if it's too hot you're screwed.
A friend of mine went through alot of effort to get his racing wheel to be able to control his mp3 player, so he could just spin the wheel with his foot from his bed and not have to get up to change tracks.
Someone once told me "The two required qualities of a successful programmer are laziness, and hubris.":P
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That's the point, going from encrypted content + key to generalized decryption system is only a matter of time and effort. The more people interested in decrypting the content, the sooner it'll happen. The only possible response for DRM authors is to make new DRM schemes, which will then also be cracked. Since it's impractical for a DRM develpment team to develop new encryption standards and change the market over to them faster than people crack the DRM, it'll never work.
The world already has N variants of MPEG4 for low-bitrate video. How many of these codecs support super ultra high quality video? American HDTV uses MPEG2, and at its current spec it looks like crap. A near-real-time encoding of a football game just looks abominable on ATSC's MPEG2. Can we start striving for an open-source codec with lossless or near lossless quality? How about 10-bit component, 4:2:2 color or better?
I thought of this when I was designing my codec actually.
How about lossless mode? That high enough quality? I've just about got it working now in my code.
How about unlimited resolution? (well maybe limited by unsigned 64bit max) How about independant per channel resolution with no restriction on odd sizes?
How about support for any depth per pixel and unlimited channels? Want do do a VR setup with Y, U, V, alpha, a mask, x2 for seperate interlacing fields, x2 again for stereo vision with 32bits per sample per channel? No problem, just expect alot of memory use on that one. But the code's there and working now.
Just about the only images I can't support in my project right now are true holographic modes, because I've been too lazy to write the 20 lines of code or so to support them without any real need yet. But if you want I could get you holographic support whenever I have an hour or two free.
Things would go alot faster if I could get some help debugging API issues like VFW. Anyone wanting to help out let me know.
Hmm, funny thing is, I've been working on an open source wavelet based video codec for the last four years or so. And even funnier is that I believe if you check over at Doom9, there's yet another one going around there too.
It was still much much easier to get around with the electric assist than without. I had alot of difficulty getting anywhere before and after I had the motor. I'm not a dedicated athlete, I was a college student studying CS at the time. While I did some working out it certainly wasn't enough to keep me in good enough shape to constantly ride up and down the hills in SF.
After awhile you get good at estimating how far you can go without running low on juice. I'd really like to see something with higher energy density like li batteries or fuel cells but it's just not happening. The market is too small for any of the people with that kind of tech to care about. If they were smart they'd develop it and then sell it to China.
Oh and I forgot to mention one technology in the list. A decent system for hydrogen storage. Seriously, this guy has a great idea and it's easy to implement,but nobody seems to be taking him up on it. I'm not sure why.
I had the DX kit from ZAP for several years when I was at college in San Francisco. I had a number of interesting experiences.
I opted for the dual battery kit because the claims of distance on a charge were optimistic by about a factor of two. I'm sure if you were on some ultralight bike riding on perfectly flat roads at low speed you could achieve the rated numbers, but in the real world cranking up twin peaks with both you and the motors straining for all you're worth it was alot shorter.
The motor will become less efficient as it heats up. It will heat up as it has to provide more torque, so it will usually quit right on the steepest hill in your journey about the time you've become too tired to pedal the heavy bike without it. Then you'll walk the rest of the way up.
If you have a friction drive like the zap kit did, where the motor drives the wheel via a roller that rides on the tire, it will be useless anytime the tire is wet, dusty, or you're going up a hill where it produces significant resistance. The solution I found to this was to install an extra gear shift on the handlebars, and run a line down the frame to a point opposite the motor. Then ran the cable to a convenient mounting hole in the motor casing so that when I pulled the lever the motor would be pulled into the tire. This let me keep traction in any condition, even snow. I showed this to some people from zap, and they thought it was great. But not great enough to put in their kits apparently. I also designed a roller that worked kind of like a thick spring that could change diameter with pressure so using this you could change gear ratios, but that never went anywhere either. If anyone wants the design to work on building it, let me know.
It won't electrocute you or short out in the rain, even in El Nino, even if you're stupid and go out in El Nino and get drenched. Your brakes however, will fail when they're hydroplaning on your rims as you careen down into the Noe valley at breakneck speeds.
Bike thieves will still steal your bike despite the fact they don't have the charger for it. Either that or someone will steal your battery and headlight and smash them in the street for no good reason. Kryptonite locks will not save you, it'll still be stolen even in broad daylight at a busy mall. I gave up after losing 2 bikes.
If you have to transport it a long distance, like to another state, don't ship it, fly with it. Most airlines have a flat $50 bike fee, just get a bike box from the local bike shop and pack it. Pack your batteries seperately in your luggage on top, so you can show them to the people at the counter in the airport before they check your bag. Lead acid gel cells are safe for commercial airline trainsport, and will likely have this printed on the batteries themselves, as mine did.
If you use the bike every day expect to replace your batteries every year or two, as they'll wear out.
Beware of other cyclists, alot of them will be mad at you for "cheating".
You'll hear lots of interesting things about better technologies, such as improved lithium ion batteries, and small fuel cells which are always "just around the corner". I waited and searched for 5 years to get either one. Even when they actually demonstrated a bike with the same kit as mine running on a li battery with half the weight and 6 times the range, they wouldn't sell it to me. They went on to make $450 laptop batteries instead and refused to license the tech to anyone interested in other applications and refused to build any other size or shape batteries unless you wanted like 100,000 units. As for the fuel cells, saw one on a bike too. But they were always experimental and "Oh we'll have this out in 2 years." It won't happen anytime soon.
You'll also hear about new and improved electric vehicles that are
Doesn't the Pentium III have that dreaded CPU identifier built in that's set on by default so people can log and track where you're browsing? Wasn't this supposed to cause the sky to fall in 1999 or something?
Obligatory userfriendly reference.
If you're looking for alternate history, it's not hard to find.
Try say, S.M. Stirling's Isle in the Sea of Time triology where Nantucket gets sent to the bronze age, or some of his earlier stuff like the Drakkan series where South Africa conquers a big chunk of the world in the 20th century.
Harry Turtledove would also be another place to look. The Worldwar series about aliens invading in 1942 has come pretty close to present day. His other alternate civil war ending series started earlier so is still a few decades behind.
Want something a bit more present day with future stuff? Try A Hymn Before Battle by John Ringo. Some good stuff there if you like power armor and lots of military style stuff. It has a few too many Sluggy Freelance references IMHO though.
William Gibson still has some interesting stuff if you haven't read it. (I'll asume everyone on slashdot has read Neal Stephenson at least) Try The Difference Engine if you want past-future. Though these days neuromancer is almost in that category considering it's a book about the information age written 20 years ago on a manual typewriter.
Have a look here for the book. Yes I bought and read it, during one of those "I'm bored and stuck in an airport's mockery of a decent bookstore, they have to have SOMETHING!" moments. It wasn't horrible. Wasn't great either.
Yup, optonline is 10mbit.
I got it in 1997-1998 or so and it was 10/10 with mutliple IPs for $24.95 a month. Then they forced everyone to move to DOCSIS by turning off support for the other modems and put everyone on 1 up 10 down with 1 IP for $34.95 a month. Then in 2002 or so they decided anyone who "abuses the network" i.e. uploads for more than a hundred megs at a time or so gets capped to 150kbps up and 10m down, permanently. Oh and now it's $49.95 a month I think, or is it moving to $59.95? If not it probably will soon.
On the DSL side, you have Verizon, which is a total nightmare from what I hear. 90k up 640k down PPPOE connections that drop you and force you to redial (REDIAL!?!?) every few hours. My ex had it for awhile, then dropped it for Roadrunner, which is almost reasonable. RCN was talking about these 850mbit non-oversubscribed pipes flowing through the city, but where'd they go?
The problem in the US is twofold. One, the telcos have semi-monopolies and are terrified that people will start running servers on "consumer grade" broadband connections and not want to pay them $600/month for a T-1 slower than most DSL these days. Optonline for example gives you no difference between their base connection and their "business class" OOL. You still have port 80 and 8080 blocked, you're still not legally allowed to run any kind of server, etc. If you call them and bitch they send you over to Lightpath which wants to charge you 4-5 digits a month for some fiber connection.
The second half of the problem is the people are ignorant. Nobody wants a 100M line to watch HDTV because they don't know more than "HDTV GOOD!" and so they go out to the mall and buy a HDTV. Wait, did I say an HDTV? I mean an HDTV READY TV. You know, in case we ever actually GET HDTV. Which is unlikely because people go "Look I've got an HDTV LOOK HOW GREAT IT IS!" while watching a standard DVD or sattelite feed and not knowing there's supposed to be better quality than that. The prosumer and videophile market who know what they're buying get to pay $100+/month to cable and sattelite for a few HDTV channels that actually work sometimes.
I find alot of things that are "USB powered" aren't. They usually need two ports and even then depend on out of spec power levels. For example, my Lacie 4x slimline DVD writer can't draw enough power from the two USB ports on my Toshiba M200. I tried a d-link USB2 card that was supposedly rated at 500ma per port (The spec maximum) but either that's not enough power or the Toshiba doesn't deliver enough power to the card. There's just no way to get it to work. On my desktop, plug it into 2 USB ports and it works fine.
I'm debating either getting a small lightweight UPS around 300VA or if I'm better off cutting up some USB device or cable and wiring in a 4AA holder to put batteries in.
...that we're now seeing quantifiable limits of how much information you could possibly consume in your lifetime, and the possibility of storing it all locally? It's kinda upsetting when you can measure your lifespan in amount of media consumed, it seems shorter somehow. Though I wonder if I can use the excuse "Sorry my playlist is already set for the next 50 years." to avoid watching another crappy movie my ex has picked out. :P
This reminds me of the SpaceOrb. I tried one, hated it, and returned it. Why? It just didn't have the precision of a mouse or joystick.
Likewise, I learned to type on a dvorak keyboard. I don't anymore. Why? Let's see.
1. Finding a programmable keyboard can be expensive or irritating. Fortunately I found some old Gateway Anykeys that still worked for $10 each.
2. Relearning to type. This took me about a month to get past 1/4 of my existing typing speed (30wpm vs 120wpm).
3. Lack of portability. This was the real killer. It wasn't typing on MY keyboard that became irritating, it was typing on OTHER PEOPLE'S keyboards that did. Because I'd have to switch back over to qwerty again to do any work on any other system at a job or at a friend's house or for my parents etc.
I did find my hands were much less tired, so I assume were I a chronic RSI sufferer, I'd consider putting up with the inconvenience. But short of hauling my own custom keyboard around, there's no solution to the pain of having to re-adapt every time you go somewhere else. Are people going to carry this thing with them and hook it up to friends/coworkers/bosses/clients computers to do work? I doubt it.
That's odd, I get similar results even using the DMZ IP adress on my router for the machine d/ling the torrent. Torrents are routinely slower than sites for me. I was getting around 14k/s on the torrent, 230k/s from MS on this one. I've had torrents exceed 200k/s but rarely. I regularly have websites exceed 700k/s. Any other possible reasons bittorent sucks? I'm fairly sure it's not a lack of connections, I regularly manage a couple hundred easy.
Maybe then we can lobby against outsourcing and set some regulated wages so I'm not struggling to make more than they do at Home Depot or UPS.
If you're really looking for "backup" as in something you can dump your data to and then secure, your best bet is to build a machine from lowend parts.
Consider the Gigabyte 7NNXP motherboard. I have one. It has 4 IDE ports and 2 SATA ports. That's 10 drives worth of controller right there. Take one, throw it in a cheap case with many bays. I see an 11 bay case, 7 3.5 and 4 5.25 on pricewatch for $20 + 7.95 shipping with a 400W power supply. More than adequate.
Figure a cheap CPU, say a $50 Athlon XP, maybe less if you scrounge one, and some cheap RAM, $50 gets you about 512MB these days, and again you might even have some lying around. Throw any junk video card in you want. $50 worth of video card and you could even be playing Doom3 at medium quality on this thing, the power you get per dollar is ridiculous these days.
The motherboard has gigabit ethernet built in. Just hook it up to your machine, use vinum or whatever to raid the drives and have it rsync your files to the HDs, and you're set. Then take the entire machine and PUT IT AWAY. Like say someplace that won't be affected if the house floods or burns down.
So let's tally up the cost here:
$170 motherboard
$30 case (shipped)
$50 CPU
$50 memory
$50 video card?
That's $350 total. Guess what, a 4 port 3ware STARTS around $350. You might get a last-generation 8port for $350, and an 8port RaidCore card also goes for $350. Plus this setup has a cpu impact of zero, it doesn't clutter your main case with drives and cables, and you can use it as a spare machine in case your primary goes down, just throw an emergency boot partition on the 2TB of space or so it'll have.
The remaining cost is just how much you're willing to spend on drives. But you still haven't spent more than a typical highend RAID controller and you've got way more processing power and flexibility.
When are we going to see decent upstream at the home? 128kbps doesn't cut it. I rarely see any offering at all over 256kbps upstream. OOL offers 1024 but as soon as you begin actually USING it they cap you back to 150 to keep the network from congesting to death.
But Joe McSixpack doesn't care about that, he just wants to grab porn faster and maybe let his kids get on aol and watch some crappy realvideo trash without whining. The ISPs are so paranoid about people running servers on their networks and losing their ability to charge 5000% markup for the same connection for "business" users even though they still block ports like 80 and 25. Woe betide the industry if people realised that 1.5mbps T-1 they've been paying hundreds or thousands a month for since the early 90s is now SLOW.
It's gotten to the point where I've pretty much given up hope of ever seeing a real broadband connection in my lifetime. By the time I can afford something with decent upstream, the idiots in washington will have ISPs so paranoid that everyone will be mandatorily placed behind a NAT and their servers will continually portscan you looking for servers and p2p apps.
...is an Xmen sequel with Tim Curry as Mr. Sinister.
How about cluster the video output buffers of all my machines in like a giant beowulf SLI so I can run doom3 faster than slideshow?
Actually it's a gene involving taste receptors on the tounge. I can still smell it just fine. And no it doens't make my urine tasteless, it just means I can't taste the urea in mine or others, it tastes just like water unless something's wrong with it.
Actually we did gene testing in AP bio by normal observations (not blood tests or anything). One of the tests involved putting a piece of paper on your tounge. The teacher didn't tell us what it was beforehand, turns out it was treated with synthetic urea. To me it tasted just like paper, everyone else ran for the sink to throw up.
I also found out by accident that it does apply to real urine too, but that was a rather long story that happened later in college.
It really doesn't appeal to me at all as a drinkable substance (as I can still smell it and it stinks) but if I had to deal with it I'd live.
Given the choice of the two I'd take the urine over the dirty water, I know urine's normally sterile unless there's a urinary tract infection present.
And thanks to a recessive gene, I can't taste it anyway!
I know someone's about to reply with "And how did you find that out?", so before you do, ask if you really want to know the answer.
Just have each of their coders chip in a dollar, problem solved.
*ducks*
Perhaps you've missed AMD's introduction of the HE and EE series opterons, which have rated outputs of 55W and 30W respectively. It seems like low heat output is quickly becoming the new Mhz. When your transistor budget is so much more than what your logic requires, you can always throw another pipeline or even an entire extra cpu core on the die for more performance, but if it's too hot you're screwed.
A friend of mine went through alot of effort to get his racing wheel to be able to control his mp3 player, so he could just spin the wheel with his foot from his bed and not have to get up to change tracks.
:P
Someone once told me "The two required qualities of a successful programmer are laziness, and hubris."