Jason Scott appears to have done a very good job with this documentary. Don't let the 7 hour number scare you, it is broken into 7 different parts that cover different things... For instance, there is 1 hour devoted to the underground scene and ansi art scene..
Once I saw the preview it did dawn on me how much there really was to cover. It seemed well presented, and probably STILL not complete!
From those that were around in the BBS days... Do you remember the Dual Standard HST craze? Telegard 2.5 and 2.7, FidoNet and crashmail... OOFNet and THG, ACiD and iCE, that horrible RIP graphics garbage... and of course the true community the local BBSes provided that is generally lacking with the global internet?
I saw the preview of the film @ Defcon, and also saw Jason speak @ 5th Hope about preserving media. It is interesting, as the project I tried to deliver to 5th hope was a video archive system --- collecting as much video content related to the underground computer world as possible, and delivering it on demand. Good news is the archive is growing -- bad news is there is still millions of news casts and other "reports" that I don't have... if anyone has old VHS/Beta tapes related to anything involving computers or telecom, please let me know. My last big milestone was the Whiz Kids tv series from 84! Also found Hack Attack, aired on Disc in 94... Very interesting stuff. Whiz Kids floored me, as the technologies exploited in this 1984 tv series were so ahead of their time, including Motorola MDT and DOT signs!! Crazy stuff.
Where was I, oh yes-- 7 x 1 hour documentaries , each covering a different aspect/portion of the BBS scene! Watching the preview, I wanted to immediately see the whole thing. I can't speak for everyone, but I personally have been eager for the release of his work. He also stated that in a year or two the cuts that hit the floor during editing will be given to the archive.org folks. Very very cool!
Couldn't one just take the GNUnilink package from Sourceforge/Freshmeat and combine it with the short-lived Sony XM receiver that was a Unilink module, and control it that way?
(Unilink is Sony's protocol that allows decks to control disc changers and a limited number of other devices like TV tuners, mobile VHS VCR, DSP modules and so forth).
I'm sorry... I just don't like the idea of mixing the unreliability of PeeCees with the PBX. Sure, the voice mail hosts are stable (Unixware with Audry Audix and the age old "I'm Sorry your having trouble.".... But the whole hoopla with these asterisk boxes. I *LAUGH* everytime an email hits the asterisk-users list "HELP HELP NO CALLS ARE WORKING I DON'T KNOW WHATS WRONG!!@#"
That is what you get! Friends with NBX's telling me about how they crash, and all phone calls in the entire building halt. That is hilarious! Should of bought a Definity.
Silly IT managers buying the latest and "greatest"... meanwhile Merlin Legends and Definities complete year after year of uninterrupted service.
You can buy a Pinto (Dell) to try to run your plumbing business. If the PInto/Dell is in the shop (owned with Spyware, down due to hardware failures, slow due to degreading OS) then there is business being lost. Time is money in business.
If a iMac costs $1500, is more availible due to better security, requires less time for management... then maybe it is the better solution than the $700 Dell.
Cray not-too-long-ago had major announcements with the RedStorm project. I believe that system is supposed to be a single image 10,000 CPU AMD based rig. There are some oddities friends have pointed out, like the OS is based on IRIX I believe...
Actually that references the X1, which is not based on PeeCee stuff, but actually a 8 core MPM.
Sad thing is, even with Red Storm I think IBM will remain on top as their contract calls for 130,000 of their powerPCs on one system?
It would be nice to see Cray on top, with something other than a commoditiy processors. I realize the T3D and T3E were both Alpha based systems.
PS, I still have a J932se 32 proc Vector Cray ( for sale ) if anyone wants a Cray for home. $4500, real deal 3 cabinet Cray from 97', most likely used for gov't nuclear energy something-or-other. Located in Southeastern Virginia.
The infrastructure costs for broadband service require real money. While the VOIP services take server space and equipment to handoff to conventional switches (Do they actually drop gear in every NPA???), chances are the costs are no where near that of maintaining a metropolitan coax cable network (cablemodems) or paying the local telco to rack out DSLAMS (DSL).
If it follows web hosting, maybe phone service will go down to $3/month? I totally don't get that, for $3 a month I wouldn't answer someone's problem, but these dumb companies come along trying to outprice each other... then eventually the entire market ends up in the toilet, with these companies hoping that one can outlast all the others after they all go out of business. A million exist, hundreds dissapear daily... but people go for the walmart prices.
As someone else pointed out, cell phones are really the killer. The one thing that bugs me -- is cell phones suck so bad. Look at the older Motorola AMPS bag and handheld phones. The analog ones. The sound quality was better (in my opinion) than the modern day uberdigital CDMA sets. Alltel charges $6 a month for their crappy voice mail service, which out of bad design *always* reports an invalid key entry at the top of the menu even though nothing was hit. *GHETTO* I'd like to see serious competition on the cell phone world -- I wish we could outlaw the 1 year / 2 year contracts, that could potentially help. The contracts screw things up, since people get stuck with substandard service.
Also a unit to provide a real FXO port from a cell phone!! That provides ring voltage and all. Drop your phone in the cradle and the calls come thru the house phones or a PBX port or whatever (And not that stupid thing that auto-forwards the calls to landline #).
What will this do to ILECs? Verizon and Pacific Telesis and SBC aren't going to be able to compete, especially with the taxes. I love the lack of taxes, that is so funny! Either the laws will be updated, and the VOIP services will look less attractive, or the ILECs will be hurt heavily. Verizon's fiber to the curb is the right idea, keep up or go extinct!
Another thing I haven't looked into. Norfolk Virginia supposidly has stupid high taxes on phone circuits. With Vonage or Packet8 or AT&T, you get around that. If Virginia imposes taxes, and you just order your Voip endpoint registering it in a different area code, then avoid all the taxes? The usefulness of area codes to determine location is about to change.
The real question is... without the need for landlines anymore, what are we geeks to do with the PBX's installed in our houses?
PS - VOIP conf bridges! Oh yes, like the old days of Alliances, only legal! Can we get 23 channel VOIP PRIs from Vonage for $50/month yet!?
The article lacks enough information... Often times direct exposure from handheld pointers has been cited and hyped as if it was a 40 watt 523nm YAG laser.
There are rules and restrictions for directing coherent laser light up into the sky at night. You generally file a report with the center for disease and radiological health.
In addition to all of this, even with a 5 watt argon, at a great distance the beam will fall out of coherency. There is a big difference between a beam that is tightly focused / coherent, and one where the output is spread on a 12" circle (temOO?).
Another big factor is if the laser is moving real fast, once again the light is spread out...
The US has pretty strict laws on this stuff, where as other countries do not. You will see pictures of crowd scanning from high powered lasers in other countries, but you won't generally find crowd scanning above 5mw here.
There is more information about lasers at the laser faq site (google for Sam's Laser Faq). Laser-FX International also has a bit of information about laser show setups. I have some pictures of my 150mw argon-ion and large frame argon that puts out somewhere between 2.5 and 5 watts of power at my homepage ( http://users.757.org/~ethan )... Lots of pictures.
Without colimating optics, the laser beam from the 150mw argon spreads to 6" or more across at a distance of 1000'.
Here is Southeastern Virignia, Cox Fibernet runs one of the two Fiber optic MANs that I know of (Verizon being the other). Their prices are pretty high, it makes it hard to compete with other regions. A DS3 on verizon copper can be had for much cheaper than Cox's advertised DS3 circuit+loop price. The worst part is, they have weekly outages that hit some of their bigger customers (like Hospitals). I've heard of business customers getting notices that their service may be interrupted for 8 hours on a Saturday night "for upgrades." Perfect, for a chain of PIZZA SHOPS!
During Hurracne Isabel, the thing fell apart leaving must customers dark (it's made of metro rings). If two nodes go down everyone inbetween is dead until power can be restored to one of the two nodes.
Just like fiber optic MANs, wireless may or may not add business capability.
In our region, we have offered to supply, for free, wireless internet access at Norfolk International Airport... and been turned down numerous times. They would much rather have someone paying them to offer a for-pay service. Our goal was to demonstrate that there are technically literate people in the area, and we understand how frustrating it is dealing with airports -- it might be nice is SOMETHING would go right for travellers.
I played with the idea of using high gain directionals and pounding the Norfolk International airport with signal, but everyone I know said that would be a bad idea. So the way I look at it, a loss for the community -- but not my fault.
Oh yes, here is one for the books. The night before we embarked on the trip to get the Cray, a roomate and another friend decided to have fun with the truck we were to take on the trip.
http://users.757.org/~fc/CrayExpress/
One side actually made it from Virginia Beach to Pittsburgh in tact. Kind of funny rolling onto a gov't facility with that on the truck. The Cray Express part came off in rain and hit a BMW X5 in Williamsburg Va. They were pretty pissed off.
Some day I will put together a full web page about that trip... it was exausting, but fun... mostly.
HOORAY! (Friend told me one of my computers was up on eBay!).
Not quite a Hal, but needs a good home! As do the Challenge XLs.
The IMSAI from War Games was on eBay a long time ago, I was drooling. I think it ended up in a museum or on display. Pretty neat stuff, the guy who brought back IMSAI owns it and was auctioning it (Todd F.).
Okay, so recently I had the misfortune of using some 3com NICs in FreeBSD servers for a project. I hereby swear off the use of 3com cards. I notice that on multiple switches the thruput is horrible (Cabletron ELS and 7C, Netgear, Cisco 5513).
Also, where I used to work they bought a 3com RAS solution. The CLI was pretty bad compared to my favorite at the time, Livingston Portmasters. It was overpriced, and just seemed like a botched design with the CPU in one box and a $2000 add on with 4 modems in it.
Some people seem to have a thing for 3com. I think it is mostly the people that used their cards when 3com was the major player. Their earlier switches do seem rugged, but I'd probably look to SMC Tigerswitch (owned by Enterasys now?) before 3com for a SOHO deployment. I'm odd, even for SOHO I like managed switches and rackmount. And metal boxes, I dig NetGears form factors. PS, is NetGear still tied to Bay? Bay was sold to Nortel, Netgear used to be Bay Networks. Is Netgear Notel or the existing Bay Networks? Confusion.
I'd imagine it is management that plauges 3com. They announced the end of all high end products a while ago, since Cisco's market share was owning them (and others like Riverstone, Extreme, Enterasys, Foundry). They wanted to concentrate on their NICs (one word, intel Pro 10/100) and little baby network devices.
Cisco dominates the market. I own a few pieces of Cisco gear, ALOT of Cabletron/Enterasys surplus and many of the smaller vendors. Cisco gear is indeed nice, I like it but there is a premium to be paid (unless your like me and buy from eBay, a practice Cisco tried unsuccessfully to stop).
There have been alot of small players that might have competed but the major players buy them up. Prominet got bought by Lucent, their products became the Cajun family (and Intel resold some of their stuff). There are others (ELS series from Cabletron was a smaller company that got bought out). You can see it when you dig thru the firmware binaries:-) Look for copyrights and look up the no-names you see on the copyrights.
First, at least he didn't start emailing parts of the user's mailspool to address book entries!
I always thought it was kind of ironic when the small people back the groups like SPA / BSA. Those "industry" groups represent those who fund them, and AFAIK will do nothing for the little guy. They are funded by the big players.
There have been a few other similiar cases. I believe one of the popular Windows CD recording packages would burn garbage CDs if you entered the wrong serial number, or entered one of the popular serial numbers found on google.
Don't forget, there is 1000 channels now but the avg subscriber sees like 130 of them. Many of the channels are duplicates from each local market, and you only get permission to access your local market if you are registered as living there. I saw a setup with a hacked card once, and it had access to all of the markets, it was insane and browsing the list of channels took forever.
Don't forget the upsell opportunities. Figure 700 of them will be pay per view, additional premium channels and the like.
So in the end, there might be 1700 channels, but you will get 100 of them, and even then 30 will be "Music channels" (Which aren't really TV channels at all). Our local cable provider does this. They claim 200 channels on the digital service, yet 70 are pay per view and 30 are music.
On another note, DirecTV uses a DS3 circuit and racks of gear in each market to encode and transport the video back to their uplink. It isn't easy to own your own TV channel, but if you had a nice 5 watt VHF or UHF transmitter setup, you could probably overpower your local TV channel using a directional antenna aimed at the DirecTV receiving tower for their local feed. This should allow you to take over the feed of the local channel to DirecTV? Probably not enough viewers to make it worth it, but you could be captain midnight 2.
I have a web site that runs about 16 real time streaming audio feeds. I went to the mp3 format for compatibility. In my recommendations to our visitors, I strictly recommend AGAINST installing any RealPlayer products, due to the fact that the player is clunky and appears to take over many file type associations.
Have you considered a stripped down, player only utility for the Windows platform? I understand your desire to market other services, but honestly the current Real One offering is more of a burden on the system than it is worth.
Why do you expect content providers would pay for your Real studio application to create content for such a horrible player?
Just a CODEC to plug into Microsoft Media Player 9 would be great. Personally I use utilities to convert the RealMedia format the MPEG1, to avoid the hassle of dealing with your player product.
The earlier Windows Media production suite was also a blatent rip off of your Real Producer product. I can see Microsoft had their eyes on your company.
I haven't tried Media Player 10, maybe Microsoft took your lead in making a player utility that is bloated, slow, resource consuming, and nagware ridden?
I realize MP3 is not an open standard, and that the freeware utilities to produce MP3 audio streams are probably not licensed from Thompson, the newer holder to the rights of the mp3 format. But the compatibility across platforms can't be beat.
I won't use quicktime due to the Windows nagware feature. Once again, content producers PAY for the production tools, the end users should be able to see the end result without paying to get full screen capabilities.
If only there was a streaming video equivilent to MP3.
Given the sinking cost on digital still cameras (2mp CCDs are considered outdated it seems, 5mp is the new hotness)... it isn't surprising that HD camcorders are showing up.
My questions are more about the loss in compression, and how it interacts with existing editing suites? Standard 400mbps firewire? When your capturing from firewire on a host, and it tries to render the live video stream, is Premiere going to blow up? (Well, Premiere blows up on it's own constantly without wierd hardware (Premiere XP is supposidly much better)).
Neato, but expected. Now all the people can replace those old camcorders in the closet that see one use ever two years with a newer, better, camcorder that will see a use every two years:-)
Woah! Blast from the past! Old school like 1995, ATL SCON ! WHOO WHOO!
Not unless you are referring to the Xmas lights project, in that case it wasn't quite parallel port... but it will be BACK AGAIN this year! Using the MidiBox64 and DIO modules, instead of ISA interfaces.
A good quality DAC/ADC setup capable of 48khz audio. The Indy/Indigo^2 could change the electrical characteristics and turn the headphone port into line out 3+4 and mic port into line in 3+4 for 4 track recording, this was a nice perk.
It featured SPDIF in and out as far back as 1992?. Newer systems had AES/BEU ports that could do several protocols for 8 track communications to ADAT and similiar systems.
Simple and effective. A DAC/ADC setup with low noise floor, high quality. That is all that is required.
Everyone goes for stupid 5.1 channel crap. Blaaa. How about something that is stable, basic, and works well.
The on board audio on my Via? Sucked. On board audio on the Soyo board I use now is _HORRIBLE_. I'm using a SB Live in the PC, and it is fine -- I hacked the Soyo riser card that has the TOSLink in and out to the SBLive expansion connector (details on my webpage) and that allows use of an external DAC and what not.
I owned a turtle beach montego II, but Crative bought and terminated ?Aureal? so drivers went MIA. I was pissed, and that turned me against most PC sound card vendors.
But yea, overall PC sound cards are nutty, wishing to push goofy "features" and destroyed brand names (THX) on the sheeple. Does anyone actually think they have a THX setup around their computer? I mean, come on. I'm not an audio snob by any means but much of it is plain rediculous
I recently got a Macintosh G4 to add to the PC and SGI. It will be nice to explore the audio applications that are availible under OS X.
Oh and my vote for my greatest moment in PC sound? Maybe hearing Space Quest III on the Adlib... or The Sound Blaster 1.0 when ?Roger Wilco? says WHERE AM I!?. Oh yea, and Ghostbusters II by activision talked out of the Sound Blaster 1.0.
Never owned a MT-32, but had my share of GRAVIS ULTRASOUNDS! Red card of love, rocking the Renaissance Composer 669 and Future Crew demos. Ahhh the good ol days.
A while ago SOME GUY ON IRC personal Cabletron switch puked out, so SOME GUY ON IRC needed a new firmware image. Low and behold, SOME GUY found an account via google. Some school posted theirs online. (Cabletron makes overpriced gear sold to gov't mainly, you can generally get enterprise level huge switches on ebay for $5, since it doesn't carry the Cisco name.). Oh that was a lucky find, since hardly anyone uses Cabletron (now Enterasys) equipment, it is hard to find unlike Cisco CCO accounts.
Google rocks! Don't forget to google for your FLEXLM license files for your Solaris and similar systems, or your crusty Digital licenses for VMS, OSF/1, etc.
I heard the people at Valve aren't impressed with Open Source. (I own a game that is constantly broken because of their Steam advertisement distribution system, so no, I'm not a Valve fan).
Slashdot Mirror
In 15 years you will be snatching up the $50 slashdot 30 hour documentary...
Part 1... BSD is dead!
Part 2... Hot Griz in my pants
*sigh*
Jason Scott appears to have done a very good job with this documentary. Don't let the 7 hour number scare you, it is broken into 7 different parts that cover different things... For instance, there is 1 hour devoted to the underground scene and ansi art scene..
Once I saw the preview it did dawn on me how much there really was to cover. It seemed well presented, and probably STILL not complete!
From those that were around in the BBS days... Do you remember the Dual Standard HST craze? Telegard 2.5 and 2.7, FidoNet and crashmail... OOFNet and THG, ACiD and iCE, that horrible RIP graphics garbage... and of course the true community the local BBSes provided that is generally lacking with the global internet?
I saw the preview of the film @ Defcon, and also saw Jason speak @ 5th Hope about preserving media. It is interesting, as the project I tried to deliver to 5th hope was a video archive system --- collecting as much video content related to the underground computer world as possible, and delivering it on demand. Good news is the archive is growing -- bad news is there is still millions of news casts and other "reports" that I don't have... if anyone has old VHS/Beta tapes related to anything involving computers or telecom, please let me know. My last big milestone was the Whiz Kids tv series from 84! Also found Hack Attack, aired on Disc in 94... Very interesting stuff. Whiz Kids floored me, as the technologies exploited in this 1984 tv series were so ahead of their time, including Motorola MDT and DOT signs!! Crazy stuff.
Where was I, oh yes-- 7 x 1 hour documentaries , each covering a different aspect/portion of the BBS scene! Watching the preview, I wanted to immediately see the whole thing. I can't speak for everyone, but I personally have been eager for the release of his work. He also stated that in a year or two the cuts that hit the floor during editing will be given to the archive.org folks. Very very cool!
Couldn't one just take the GNUnilink package from Sourceforge/Freshmeat and combine it with the short-lived Sony XM receiver that was a Unilink module, and control it that way?
(Unilink is Sony's protocol that allows decks to control disc changers and a limited number of other devices like TV tuners, mobile VHS VCR, DSP modules and so forth).
I'm sorry... I just don't like the idea of mixing the unreliability of PeeCees with the PBX. Sure, the voice mail hosts are stable (Unixware with Audry Audix and the age old "I'm Sorry your having trouble.".... But the whole hoopla with these asterisk boxes. I *LAUGH* everytime an email hits the asterisk-users list "HELP HELP NO CALLS ARE WORKING I DON'T KNOW WHATS WRONG!!@#"
... meanwhile Merlin Legends and Definities complete year after year of uninterrupted service.
That is what you get! Friends with NBX's telling me about how they crash, and all phone calls in the entire building halt. That is hilarious! Should of bought a Definity.
Silly IT managers buying the latest and "greatest"
(Not saying that hardware PBXes don't fail).
You can buy a Pinto (Dell) to try to run your plumbing business. If the PInto/Dell is in the shop (owned with Spyware, down due to hardware failures, slow due to degreading OS) then there is business being lost. Time is money in business.
If a iMac costs $1500, is more availible due to better security, requires less time for management... then maybe it is the better solution than the $700 Dell.
Ahhhh that explains the shift in technologies from the X1 to RS/opteron! Much thanks for the infos.
Cray not-too-long-ago had major announcements with the RedStorm project. I believe that system is supposed to be a single image 10,000 CPU AMD based rig. There are some oddities friends have pointed out, like the OS is based on IRIX I believe...
Yea check this out:
Cray Unicos/mp"
Actually that references the X1, which is not based on PeeCee stuff, but actually a 8 core MPM.
Sad thing is, even with Red Storm I think IBM will remain on top as their contract calls for 130,000 of their powerPCs on one system?
It would be nice to see Cray on top, with something other than a commoditiy processors. I realize the T3D and T3E were both Alpha based systems.
PS, I still have a J932se 32 proc Vector Cray ( for sale ) if anyone wants a Cray for home. $4500, real deal 3 cabinet Cray from 97', most likely used for gov't nuclear energy something-or-other. Located in Southeastern Virginia.
This is similiar I believe to how Cray "developed" the air-cooled J90 series.
The infrastructure costs for broadband service require real money. While the VOIP services take server space and equipment to handoff to conventional switches (Do they actually drop gear in every NPA???), chances are the costs are no where near that of maintaining a metropolitan coax cable network (cablemodems) or paying the local telco to rack out DSLAMS (DSL).
If it follows web hosting, maybe phone service will go down to $3/month? I totally don't get that, for $3 a month I wouldn't answer someone's problem, but these dumb companies come along trying to outprice each other... then eventually the entire market ends up in the toilet, with these companies hoping that one can outlast all the others after they all go out of business. A million exist, hundreds dissapear daily... but people go for the walmart prices.
As someone else pointed out, cell phones are really the killer. The one thing that bugs me -- is cell phones suck so bad. Look at the older Motorola AMPS bag and handheld phones. The analog ones. The sound quality was better (in my opinion) than the modern day uberdigital CDMA sets. Alltel charges $6 a month for their crappy voice mail service, which out of bad design *always* reports an invalid key entry at the top of the menu even though nothing was hit. *GHETTO* I'd like to see serious competition on the cell phone world -- I wish we could outlaw the 1 year / 2 year contracts, that could potentially help. The contracts screw things up, since people get stuck with substandard service. Also a unit to provide a real FXO port from a cell phone!! That provides ring voltage and all. Drop your phone in the cradle and the calls come thru the house phones or a PBX port or whatever (And not that stupid thing that auto-forwards the calls to landline #).
What will this do to ILECs? Verizon and Pacific Telesis and SBC aren't going to be able to compete, especially with the taxes. I love the lack of taxes, that is so funny! Either the laws will be updated, and the VOIP services will look less attractive, or the ILECs will be hurt heavily. Verizon's fiber to the curb is the right idea, keep up or go extinct!
Another thing I haven't looked into. Norfolk Virginia supposidly has stupid high taxes on phone circuits. With Vonage or Packet8 or AT&T, you get around that. If Virginia imposes taxes, and you just order your Voip endpoint registering it in a different area code, then avoid all the taxes? The usefulness of area codes to determine location is about to change.
The real question is... without the need for landlines anymore, what are we geeks to do with the PBX's installed in our houses?
PS - VOIP conf bridges! Oh yes, like the old days of Alliances, only legal! Can we get 23 channel VOIP PRIs from Vonage for $50/month yet!?
Enough rambling, presidential debates in 20!
Crazy times!
The article lacks enough information... Often times direct exposure from handheld pointers has been cited and hyped as if it was a 40 watt 523nm YAG laser.
There are rules and restrictions for directing coherent laser light up into the sky at night. You generally file a report with the center for disease and radiological health.
In addition to all of this, even with a 5 watt argon, at a great distance the beam will fall out of coherency. There is a big difference between a beam that is tightly focused / coherent, and one where the output is spread on a 12" circle (temOO?).
Another big factor is if the laser is moving real fast, once again the light is spread out...
The US has pretty strict laws on this stuff, where as other countries do not. You will see pictures of crowd scanning from high powered lasers in other countries, but you won't generally find crowd scanning above 5mw here.
There is more information about lasers at the laser faq site (google for Sam's Laser Faq). Laser-FX International also has a bit of information about laser show setups. I have some pictures of my 150mw argon-ion and large frame argon that puts out somewhere between 2.5 and 5 watts of power at my homepage ( http://users.757.org/~ethan )... Lots of pictures.
Without colimating optics, the laser beam from the 150mw argon spreads to 6" or more across at a distance of 1000'.
Meg Whitman and Michael Dell? Why? The both run organizations that have horrible customer support!?!?
eBay makes Dell look good.
You have to love it.
Here is Southeastern Virignia, Cox Fibernet runs one of the two Fiber optic MANs that I know of (Verizon being the other). Their prices are pretty high, it makes it hard to compete with other regions. A DS3 on verizon copper can be had for much cheaper than Cox's advertised DS3 circuit+loop price. The worst part is, they have weekly outages that hit some of their bigger customers (like Hospitals). I've heard of business customers getting notices that their service may be interrupted for 8 hours on a Saturday night "for upgrades." Perfect, for a chain of PIZZA SHOPS!
During Hurracne Isabel, the thing fell apart leaving must customers dark (it's made of metro rings). If two nodes go down everyone inbetween is dead until power can be restored to one of the two nodes.
Just like fiber optic MANs, wireless may or may not add business capability.
In our region, we have offered to supply, for free, wireless internet access at Norfolk International Airport... and been turned down numerous times. They would much rather have someone paying them to offer a for-pay service. Our goal was to demonstrate that there are technically literate people in the area, and we understand how frustrating it is dealing with airports -- it might be nice is SOMETHING would go right for travellers.
I played with the idea of using high gain directionals and pounding the Norfolk International airport with signal, but everyone I know said that would be a bad idea. So the way I look at it, a loss for the community -- but not my fault.
Don't forget the battery powered digital to analog converter to go with the battery powered non-HDTV.
Oh yes, here is one for the books. The night before we embarked on the trip to get the Cray, a roomate and another friend decided to have fun with the truck we were to take on the trip.
http://users.757.org/~fc/CrayExpress/
One side actually made it from Virginia Beach to Pittsburgh in tact. Kind of funny rolling onto a gov't facility with that on the truck. The Cray Express part came off in rain and hit a BMW X5 in Williamsburg Va. They were pretty pissed off.
Some day I will put together a full web page about that trip... it was exausting, but fun... mostly.
HOORAY! (Friend told me one of my computers was up on eBay!).
Not quite a Hal, but needs a good home! As do the Challenge XLs.
The IMSAI from War Games was on eBay a long time ago, I was drooling. I think it ended up in a museum or on display. Pretty neat stuff, the guy who brought back IMSAI owns it and was auctioning it (Todd F.).
Okay, so recently I had the misfortune of using some 3com NICs in FreeBSD servers for a project. I hereby swear off the use of 3com cards. I notice that on multiple switches the thruput is horrible (Cabletron ELS and 7C, Netgear, Cisco 5513).
:-) Look for copyrights and look up the no-names you see on the copyrights.
Also, where I used to work they bought a 3com RAS solution. The CLI was pretty bad compared to my favorite at the time, Livingston Portmasters. It was overpriced, and just seemed like a botched design with the CPU in one box and a $2000 add on with 4 modems in it.
Some people seem to have a thing for 3com. I think it is mostly the people that used their cards when 3com was the major player. Their earlier switches do seem rugged, but I'd probably look to SMC Tigerswitch (owned by Enterasys now?) before 3com for a SOHO deployment. I'm odd, even for SOHO I like managed switches and rackmount. And metal boxes, I dig NetGears form factors. PS, is NetGear still tied to Bay? Bay was sold to Nortel, Netgear used to be Bay Networks. Is Netgear Notel or the existing Bay Networks? Confusion.
I'd imagine it is management that plauges 3com. They announced the end of all high end products a while ago, since Cisco's market share was owning them (and others like Riverstone, Extreme, Enterasys, Foundry). They wanted to concentrate on their NICs (one word, intel Pro 10/100) and little baby network devices.
Cisco dominates the market. I own a few pieces of Cisco gear, ALOT of Cabletron/Enterasys surplus and many of the smaller vendors. Cisco gear is indeed nice, I like it but there is a premium to be paid (unless your like me and buy from eBay, a practice Cisco tried unsuccessfully to stop).
There have been alot of small players that might have competed but the major players buy them up. Prominet got bought by Lucent, their products became the Cajun family (and Intel resold some of their stuff). There are others (ELS series from Cabletron was a smaller company that got bought out). You can see it when you dig thru the firmware binaries
First, at least he didn't start emailing parts of the user's mailspool to address book entries!
I always thought it was kind of ironic when the small people back the groups like SPA / BSA. Those "industry" groups represent those who fund them, and AFAIK will do nothing for the little guy. They are funded by the big players.
There have been a few other similiar cases. I believe one of the popular Windows CD recording packages would burn garbage CDs if you entered the wrong serial number, or entered one of the popular serial numbers found on google.
Don't forget, there is 1000 channels now but the avg subscriber sees like 130 of them. Many of the channels are duplicates from each local market, and you only get permission to access your local market if you are registered as living there. I saw a setup with a hacked card once, and it had access to all of the markets, it was insane and browsing the list of channels took forever.
Don't forget the upsell opportunities. Figure 700 of them will be pay per view, additional premium channels and the like.
So in the end, there might be 1700 channels, but you will get 100 of them, and even then 30 will be "Music channels" (Which aren't really TV channels at all). Our local cable provider does this. They claim 200 channels on the digital service, yet 70 are pay per view and 30 are music.
On another note, DirecTV uses a DS3 circuit and racks of gear in each market to encode and transport the video back to their uplink. It isn't easy to own your own TV channel, but if you had a nice 5 watt VHF or UHF transmitter setup, you could probably overpower your local TV channel using a directional antenna aimed at the DirecTV receiving tower for their local feed. This should allow you to take over the feed of the local channel to DirecTV? Probably not enough viewers to make it worth it, but you could be captain midnight 2.
I have a web site that runs about 16 real time streaming audio feeds. I went to the mp3 format for compatibility. In my recommendations to our visitors, I strictly recommend AGAINST installing any RealPlayer products, due to the fact that the player is clunky and appears to take over many file type associations.
Have you considered a stripped down, player only utility for the Windows platform? I understand your desire to market other services, but honestly the current Real One offering is more of a burden on the system than it is worth.
Why do you expect content providers would pay for your Real studio application to create content for such a horrible player?
Just a CODEC to plug into Microsoft Media Player 9 would be great. Personally I use utilities to convert the RealMedia format the MPEG1, to avoid the hassle of dealing with your player product.
The earlier Windows Media production suite was also a blatent rip off of your Real Producer product. I can see Microsoft had their eyes on your company.
I haven't tried Media Player 10, maybe Microsoft took your lead in making a player utility that is bloated, slow, resource consuming, and nagware ridden?
I realize MP3 is not an open standard, and that the freeware utilities to produce MP3 audio streams are probably not licensed from Thompson, the newer holder to the rights of the mp3 format. But the compatibility across platforms can't be beat.
I won't use quicktime due to the Windows nagware feature. Once again, content producers PAY for the production tools, the end users should be able to see the end result without paying to get full screen capabilities.
If only there was a streaming video equivilent to MP3.
Given the sinking cost on digital still cameras (2mp CCDs are considered outdated it seems, 5mp is the new hotness)... it isn't surprising that HD camcorders are showing up.
:-)
My questions are more about the loss in compression, and how it interacts with existing editing suites? Standard 400mbps firewire? When your capturing from firewire on a host, and it tries to render the live video stream, is Premiere going to blow up? (Well, Premiere blows up on it's own constantly without wierd hardware (Premiere XP is supposidly much better)).
Neato, but expected. Now all the people can replace those old camcorders in the closet that see one use ever two years with a newer, better, camcorder that will see a use every two years
Woah! Blast from the past! Old school like 1995, ATL SCON ! WHOO WHOO!
... but it will be BACK AGAIN this year! Using the MidiBox64 and DIO modules, instead of ISA interfaces.
Not unless you are referring to the Xmas lights project, in that case it wasn't quite parallel port
SGI had it right in 1993/1994....
A good quality DAC/ADC setup capable of 48khz audio. The Indy/Indigo^2 could change the electrical characteristics and turn the headphone port into line out 3+4 and mic port into line in 3+4 for 4 track recording, this was a nice perk.
It featured SPDIF in and out as far back as 1992?. Newer systems had AES/BEU ports that could do several protocols for 8 track communications to ADAT and similiar systems.
Simple and effective. A DAC/ADC setup with low noise floor, high quality. That is all that is required.
Everyone goes for stupid 5.1 channel crap. Blaaa. How about something that is stable, basic, and works well.
The on board audio on my Via? Sucked. On board audio on the Soyo board I use now is _HORRIBLE_. I'm using a SB Live in the PC, and it is fine -- I hacked the Soyo riser card that has the TOSLink in and out to the SBLive expansion connector (details on my webpage) and that allows use of an external DAC and what not.
I owned a turtle beach montego II, but Crative bought and terminated ?Aureal? so drivers went MIA. I was pissed, and that turned me against most PC sound card vendors.
But yea, overall PC sound cards are nutty, wishing to push goofy "features" and destroyed brand names (THX) on the sheeple. Does anyone actually think they have a THX setup around their computer? I mean, come on. I'm not an audio snob by any means but much of it is plain rediculous
I recently got a Macintosh G4 to add to the PC and SGI. It will be nice to explore the audio applications that are availible under OS X.
Oh and my vote for my greatest moment in PC sound? Maybe hearing Space Quest III on the Adlib... or The Sound Blaster 1.0 when ?Roger Wilco? says WHERE AM I!?. Oh yea, and Ghostbusters II by activision talked out of the Sound Blaster 1.0.
Never owned a MT-32, but had my share of GRAVIS ULTRASOUNDS! Red card of love, rocking the Renaissance Composer 669 and Future Crew demos. Ahhh the good ol days.
A while ago SOME GUY ON IRC personal Cabletron switch puked out, so SOME GUY ON IRC needed a new firmware image. Low and behold, SOME GUY found an account via google. Some school posted theirs online. (Cabletron makes overpriced gear sold to gov't mainly, you can generally get enterprise level huge switches on ebay for $5, since it doesn't carry the Cisco name.). Oh that was a lucky find, since hardly anyone uses Cabletron (now Enterasys) equipment, it is hard to find unlike Cisco CCO accounts.
Google rocks! Don't forget to google for your FLEXLM license files for your Solaris and similar systems, or your crusty Digital licenses for VMS, OSF/1, etc.
I heard the people at Valve aren't impressed with Open Source. (I own a game that is constantly broken because of their Steam advertisement distribution system, so no, I'm not a Valve fan).
There were iPod style devices before the iPod came out. Yea, it is small and looks nice.
There was a 486 PC called the Monorail that loosely resembles the new iMac.
I'm sure there were similiar products to iTunes from small companies that did not have that backing of major record labels.
In terms of IE versus Netscape, Microsoft had 1000+ developers working on their IE product to compete with Netscape.
The ideas from the major companies aren't really that earth shattering. The hype machine drives the lemmings.
Money makes money. This helps the top stay on top.