In terms of rust, google for "laser rot"... Laserdisc owners paid the premium and paved the way for future optical video technologies... but they paid the price. There was a number of discs that would eventually go bad. I believe it was due to air trapped in the layers and oxidation, but I could be wrong as it has been years since I checked into it.
Modern CD/DVDs should be free from it, as they corrected the manufacturing processes early on. Not sure about the cheap DVD-R/+r/-rw/+rw/CD-r/etc media.
I know people who back up audio CDs to leave them in their car. This is after people have stolen their CD folder (a folder that holds 100 CDs, if you paid $15 per CD, that is $1500...). Another issue is heat warping the disks, or the folder getting wierd and sticking to the CD.
In terms of DVDs, I've heard of maybe 1 person backing up DVDs so when their very young kids damage them, they burn another copy. I've heard of maybe 7 people total who copy stuff from say, Blockbuster.
Hope they are using names instead of IP addresses, then change your forward DNS to point to uberelite gov't site. Drop the TTL first, so you can make the change. This way the attackers get in more trouble, and the gov't will clean them up versus all the legal fees.
I used to do this years ago. With a service called DMX, or Digital Music Xpress. It was offered thru the cable company. It had a SPDIF output, which I would connect to my R3000 Indigo workstation, dump off the audio into AIFF, then run the 4 hour mp3 compression process against it.
Okay, the current system is called CALEA. I believe it consists of a Sun board in a generic box racked out at every landline, wireless and many large hotel (Vegas) switches. If you google for it there were some Phrack articles and other hack scene publications on them. I believe each one has a t1 interface, so that is 24 voice channels it can listen to. Maybe it can only redirect 12, as 12 other channels are required for redirection.
So now Vonage and Packet8 would have to drop these on their switches, assuming they properly support the standards that the CALEA boxes use. They should have the advantage of easily providing this ability from a single point, I'd imagine their servers are all in a few locations.
The funny thing is, you could just get a VOIP endpoint from a provider in a different country and wala, no CALEA. No fuss. Alot of long distance fees, though.
The last job I worked at, supposidly our employer or a related agency listened in on the home telephone conversations of an employee. The rumor I heard was that an employee was under the scope for downloading hacker utilities (a utility that determines if a host is up by pinging it?). Supervisor heard, called employee at home from his cell phone, both got nabbed, the supervisor for tipping off the employee. This was at the Navy's NMCI project. This was the rumor going around, and I don't know who the people were.
When we were younger we found what we guess were illegal phone tapes while xxx-99xx scanning. Too funny.
There are also rumors that CALEA boxes are insecure, have been owned, are connected to the internet and are using public IPs. Another conspiracy theory says they were implemented by companies that are foreign owned and were being unknowingly used to listen in on the president and led to premature release of the Monica Lewinsky audio to reporters. That is all conspiracy theory, search around. You never know, the gov't does some pretty dumb things sometime.
There is a good article in Business 2.0 about drug cartels using the data from phone switches to track federal agents and their people, by cross referencing phone numbers. They used an AS/400.
And in case you didn't know, you can listen to a Popeye's chicken drive thru in Southeastern Virginia live... open http://audio12.hrconnect.com:8000/popeyes.m3u in any mp3 player that supports internet streams/m3u playlists. Enjoy! Don't forget, EST time.
Okay, most GPS modules use serial output in one of several formats (some need a TTL converter but thats trivial). So you setup your computer to interpert the data from the real GPS, and feed it to their board with speed shifting, so you drive like the perfect grandma.
Another funny thing to do would be to see what happens if you simulate 120mph speeds and such.
When they jack your rates up, moan. Then simulate 180mph. Then 210.
Can you imagine trying to fight an error on the log box? Your rates would be insane.... "the box don't lie" the PFY behind the counter would say.
Oh yea, and in case you didn't know... you can hear a live audio feed from a Popeye's drive thru in Norfolk Virginia by opening http://audio12.hrconnect.com:8000/popeyes.m3u in any popular audio player that supports mp3 & m3u playlists.
Man, the one thing that cracks me up more than anything.... you know, the $100/ft oxygen free copper wire that supposidly has less resistance therefor better sound than lamp cable from the hardware store...
Anyways, the ignorance finally showed with the release of the TOSLink fiber optic cables used that carry the digital data (SPDIF format I believe).
Monster and other companies sell high grade TOSLink fiber optic cables that, according to the packaging, provide better sound than the factory throw ins.
It costs more than your SC to SC multimode fiber optic patch cords that you would use for a gige switch. Shit, probably more than a SM MRTJ cable for 10gig...
But the truth is, it works just as good as the cheapo. ZERO difference. It is all ones and zeros. I have a 10$ cable I used between a PC and my MD deck, and also between two MD decks. The secret is, there is a hidden option to enter a service mode where you can video the errors received on both toslink and the optical pickup.
The fact it, it is false advertising. Sure it might have more plastic wrapped around it and look cooler, but it is all just a plastic lightpipe (unlike computer cables which are indeed glass). I saw zero errors on the most budget cable out there.
Two things, first thanks for the Wired link on Cringley. I own both of the 3 tape Oregon PBS sets of his, enjoy them. I do disagree with him from time to time, and when I've replied he snaps back. Supercomputers are still sexier than clusters of commodity crap. Sorry Bob.
Anyways, I'm a heavy user of Google. But recently when unable to find a link or two I've reverted to the Yahoo search engine at search.yahoo.com. The interesting thing was I found what I was looking for without the same amount of false crap! (I think I was looking for some info on the MIDI protocol, but I don't 100% remember). It wasn't bad. So now I wonder by using google only, what am I missing out on? Alot of people are playing games to get their garbage ranked high.
My attraction to Google has always been the fact that the pages are lightweight and not filled with ads. I'm sure others feel the same way. The search.yahoo.com thing is pretty leightweight as well, I didn't know it existed until someone else (on slashdot perhaps) pointed it out.
Orkut has turned into a slow dog. Gmail is okay I guess, I still think it could be utilized as a music or warez distribution system! (Break down files and span them across mailboxes. Wala, uber bandwidth at your disposal). A client would use a server to track all of the mailboxes to find the needed data. Don't hate, it is jus the first thing that came to mind when they said free mailboxes and 1gb of storage.
Anyways, my two cents. Google ain't the only game in town. I totally don't get ask jeeves though. And how are companies like Yahoo worth so much money? Do they actually make money outside of maybe personals and auctions (I hear the auctions site is huge in.jp).
Canon printers in Chesapeake, Virginia I believe used to use Remedy staffing as a means by which NOT to hire people. New employees were hired on a temporary basis, then after 6 months or so they would just eject the majority of them. No benefits requried.
As I understand it, this may have changed. This is heresay from people that worked there that I knew. I was told when they would remove a hard working 6 monther, there were times when other friends would all get up and walk out at the same time.
Is it possible someone did the math and figured out people can't generate enough lift to keep themselves in the air (the more people you add, the heavier it gets).
So once they figured this out, they thought it would be funny to watch people try? I'm having flashbacks to the movie "Chicken Run."
Who cares about running Solaris on the Mac G5, look at IBM's efforts to convert Solaris/Sun shops over to AIX/RS6k shops! If you browse IBM's page looking at the pSeries servers (the Power series) you will notice ads about migrating from Solaris to AIX. This is a big inititive at IBM.
From our standpoint, it's goes a bit like "ewww AIX"... Solaris on the pSeries boxes would definitly be interesting. I believe IBM rebadges quite a bit of commoditiy hardware and marks the price up 900% (Older advanced 3d graphics cards for RS6000s were $30 s3 cards with different PCI identification tags and such)... so it might be easy to pick up support for quite a bit of the peripheral hardware from the Linux world.
I'm not sure I'd shove it into a production environment, and what if IBM starts to throw curveballs into the works to thwart the people running Solaris. Still totally funny if you ask my opinion. Talk about a comeback to IBM's marketing strategy, but at what cost to Sun's hardware sales.
Sony monitor quality is pretty bad. Cold solder joints / broken solder joints seem to be one big issue. As a long time Sony fan, the only products I buy from them these days it seems is surplus commercial grade equipment (Video decks, etc). It is a shame.
My car stereo deck (a minidisc ES series) has held up well, to my surprise.
When everyone makes crap, what can you do? Not so much Sony, as they charge a premium... but most consumer electronics are made as cheaply as possible. So what can you expect.
In the telcom world, the cost of the access points is hardly a concern. The Merlin Legend compatible cordless phone sets run something like $500 per phone alone.
It is probably more a matter of maintaining control for troubleshooting issues. The last thing Avaya would want is to have to deal with troubleshooting issues in a large enterprise running $19 bargain bin WAPs.
It would be cool if there was a phone that could hop on any open 802.11 network and talk to a remote VoIP server, however it would be difficult to judge the bandwidth capabilities of the local network. It wouldn't work well. VoIP is tricky, QoS plays a large role.
Nice! Did not know about search.yahoo.com! Learn something new every post.
Better results with yahoo search over google?
on
Google Sets IPO Pricing
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
This weekend I was looking for some software that would be used for live performance midi work under Windows. My goal was to control lights/lasers, but none the less I noticed when searching google most of the results were crap pages setup to rank high on google.
I turned to Yahoo's search, and found much better results with less fake keyword filled pages. This is the 3rd time recently I've discovered this.
Is google a victim of it's own success? I love the uncrowded google page, this is what attracted me to google in the first place. Now I'm starting to wonder what I'm missing by relying solely on google. Yahoo responded quickly, although the site is crowded.
Slashdot Mirror
In terms of rust, google for "laser rot" ... Laserdisc owners paid the premium and paved the way for future optical video technologies... but they paid the price. There was a number of discs that would eventually go bad. I believe it was due to air trapped in the layers and oxidation, but I could be wrong as it has been years since I checked into it.
Modern CD/DVDs should be free from it, as they corrected the manufacturing processes early on. Not sure about the cheap DVD-R/+r/-rw/+rw/CD-r/etc media.
I know people who back up audio CDs to leave them in their car. This is after people have stolen their CD folder (a folder that holds 100 CDs, if you paid $15 per CD, that is $1500 ...). Another issue is heat warping the disks, or the folder getting wierd and sticking to the CD.
In terms of DVDs, I've heard of maybe 1 person backing up DVDs so when their very young kids damage them, they burn another copy. I've heard of maybe 7 people total who copy stuff from say, Blockbuster.
However, you have to pay performance rights fees everytime your phone goes off in public.
The way I would handle the packet warriors:
Hope they are using names instead of IP addresses, then change your forward DNS to point to uberelite gov't site. Drop the TTL first, so you can make the change. This way the attackers get in more trouble, and the gov't will clean them up versus all the legal fees.
I used to do this years ago. With a service called DMX, or Digital Music Xpress. It was offered thru the cable company. It had a SPDIF output, which I would connect to my R3000 Indigo workstation, dump off the audio into AIFF, then run the 4 hour mp3 compression process against it.
Those were the days...
I just signed up, and the only thing on that site is "Borrow" ... I see no options for offering to trade items.
Slashdot is contributing to the sensationalism!
At worst someone will flood Disney.com and CNN.com off the net for a few hours. Big whoop.
Okay, the current system is called CALEA. I believe it consists of a Sun board in a generic box racked out at every landline, wireless and many large hotel (Vegas) switches. If you google for it there were some Phrack articles and other hack scene publications on them. I believe each one has a t1 interface, so that is 24 voice channels it can listen to. Maybe it can only redirect 12, as 12 other channels are required for redirection.
So now Vonage and Packet8 would have to drop these on their switches, assuming they properly support the standards that the CALEA boxes use. They should have the advantage of easily providing this ability from a single point, I'd imagine their servers are all in a few locations.
The funny thing is, you could just get a VOIP endpoint from a provider in a different country and wala, no CALEA. No fuss. Alot of long distance fees, though.
The last job I worked at, supposidly our employer or a related agency listened in on the home telephone conversations of an employee. The rumor I heard was that an employee was under the scope for downloading hacker utilities (a utility that determines if a host is up by pinging it?). Supervisor heard, called employee at home from his cell phone, both got nabbed, the supervisor for tipping off the employee. This was at the Navy's NMCI project. This was the rumor going around, and I don't know who the people were.
When we were younger we found what we guess were illegal phone tapes while xxx-99xx scanning. Too funny.
There are also rumors that CALEA boxes are insecure, have been owned, are connected to the internet and are using public IPs. Another conspiracy theory says they were implemented by companies that are foreign owned and were being unknowingly used to listen in on the president and led to premature release of the Monica Lewinsky audio to reporters. That is all conspiracy theory, search around. You never know, the gov't does some pretty dumb things sometime.
There is a good article in Business 2.0 about drug cartels using the data from phone switches to track federal agents and their people, by cross referencing phone numbers. They used an AS/400.
And in case you didn't know, you can listen to a Popeye's chicken drive thru in Southeastern Virginia live... open http://audio12.hrconnect.com:8000/popeyes.m3u in any mp3 player that supports internet streams/m3u playlists. Enjoy! Don't forget, EST time.
Okay, most GPS modules use serial output in one of several formats (some need a TTL converter but thats trivial). So you setup your computer to interpert the data from the real GPS, and feed it to their board with speed shifting, so you drive like the perfect grandma.
Another funny thing to do would be to see what happens if you simulate 120mph speeds and such. When they jack your rates up, moan. Then simulate 180mph. Then 210.
Can you imagine trying to fight an error on the log box? Your rates would be insane.... "the box don't lie" the PFY behind the counter would say.
Oh yea, and in case you didn't know... you can hear a live audio feed from a Popeye's drive thru in Norfolk Virginia by opening http://audio12.hrconnect.com:8000/popeyes.m3u in any popular audio player that supports mp3 & m3u playlists.
Man, the one thing that cracks me up more than anything.... you know, the $100/ft oxygen free copper wire that supposidly has less resistance therefor better sound than lamp cable from the hardware store...
Anyways, the ignorance finally showed with the release of the TOSLink fiber optic cables used that carry the digital data (SPDIF format I believe).
Monster and other companies sell high grade TOSLink fiber optic cables that, according to the packaging, provide better sound than the factory throw ins.
It costs more than your SC to SC multimode fiber optic patch cords that you would use for a gige switch. Shit, probably more than a SM MRTJ cable for 10gig...
But the truth is, it works just as good as the cheapo. ZERO difference. It is all ones and zeros. I have a 10$ cable I used between a PC and my MD deck, and also between two MD decks. The secret is, there is a hidden option to enter a service mode where you can video the errors received on both toslink and the optical pickup.
The fact it, it is false advertising. Sure it might have more plastic wrapped around it and look cooler, but it is all just a plastic lightpipe (unlike computer cables which are indeed glass). I saw zero errors on the most budget cable out there.
Don't, (jibbie wack), don't believe the hype.
Two things, first thanks for the Wired link on Cringley. I own both of the 3 tape Oregon PBS sets of his, enjoy them. I do disagree with him from time to time, and when I've replied he snaps back. Supercomputers are still sexier than clusters of commodity crap. Sorry Bob.
.jp).
Anyways, I'm a heavy user of Google. But recently when unable to find a link or two I've reverted to the Yahoo search engine at search.yahoo.com. The interesting thing was I found what I was looking for without the same amount of false crap! (I think I was looking for some info on the MIDI protocol, but I don't 100% remember). It wasn't bad. So now I wonder by using google only, what am I missing out on? Alot of people are playing games to get their garbage ranked high.
My attraction to Google has always been the fact that the pages are lightweight and not filled with ads. I'm sure others feel the same way. The search.yahoo.com thing is pretty leightweight as well, I didn't know it existed until someone else (on slashdot perhaps) pointed it out.
Orkut has turned into a slow dog. Gmail is okay I guess, I still think it could be utilized as a music or warez distribution system! (Break down files and span them across mailboxes. Wala, uber bandwidth at your disposal). A client would use a server to track all of the mailboxes to find the needed data. Don't hate, it is jus the first thing that came to mind when they said free mailboxes and 1gb of storage.
Anyways, my two cents. Google ain't the only game in town. I totally don't get ask jeeves though. And how are companies like Yahoo worth so much money? Do they actually make money outside of maybe personals and auctions (I hear the auctions site is huge in
Canon printers in Chesapeake, Virginia I believe used to use Remedy staffing as a means by which NOT to hire people. New employees were hired on a temporary basis, then after 6 months or so they would just eject the majority of them. No benefits requried.
As I understand it, this may have changed. This is heresay from people that worked there that I knew. I was told when they would remove a hard working 6 monther, there were times when other friends would all get up and walk out at the same time.
The intel page says they use three of these.
:-)
... give them time.
Of course, it brings back the convergence issue (like those of us that still run CRT projectors face
Interesting technology, they will figure out how to go full color
First, depending on your Accord year (00/01/something) had the warrantys extended to 100,000 miles.
Second, the bulbs are frigging expensive, and the low cost projectors seem to be 800x600.
Is it possible someone did the math and figured out people can't generate enough lift to keep themselves in the air (the more people you add, the heavier it gets).
So once they figured this out, they thought it would be funny to watch people try? I'm having flashbacks to the movie "Chicken Run."
Who cares about running Solaris on the Mac G5, look at IBM's efforts to convert Solaris/Sun shops over to AIX/RS6k shops! If you browse IBM's page looking at the pSeries servers (the Power series) you will notice ads about migrating from Solaris to AIX. This is a big inititive at IBM.
... Solaris on the pSeries boxes would definitly be interesting. I believe IBM rebadges quite a bit of commoditiy hardware and marks the price up 900% (Older advanced 3d graphics cards for RS6000s were $30 s3 cards with different PCI identification tags and such)... so it might be easy to pick up support for quite a bit of the peripheral hardware from the Linux world.
From our standpoint, it's goes a bit like "ewww AIX"
I'm not sure I'd shove it into a production environment, and what if IBM starts to throw curveballs into the works to thwart the people running Solaris. Still totally funny if you ask my opinion. Talk about a comeback to IBM's marketing strategy, but at what cost to Sun's hardware sales.
IRIX > Linux.
It is a cluster of supercomputers :-)
Seriously, the way the Altix is laid out... I believe it is a cluster of 512 processor supercomputers.
This isn't uncommon. Look at ASCI BLUE, or some of the other large IBM SP2 based systems.
SGI said the reason they went with the Itantium2 versus AMD Opteron is that the Altix was being developed before the Opteron went to market.
Forget highway safety, I want a blue box in my car so I can jump around on telco switches!
Try not loosing the CD! Sheesh. I'm surprised they would send you a new one, I would figure it would violate the license agreement with Microsoft.
Sony monitor quality is pretty bad. Cold solder joints / broken solder joints seem to be one big issue. As a long time Sony fan, the only products I buy from them these days it seems is surplus commercial grade equipment (Video decks, etc). It is a shame.
My car stereo deck (a minidisc ES series) has held up well, to my surprise.
When everyone makes crap, what can you do? Not so much Sony, as they charge a premium... but most consumer electronics are made as cheaply as possible. So what can you expect.
In the telcom world, the cost of the access points is hardly a concern. The Merlin Legend compatible cordless phone sets run something like $500 per phone alone.
It is probably more a matter of maintaining control for troubleshooting issues. The last thing Avaya would want is to have to deal with troubleshooting issues in a large enterprise running $19 bargain bin WAPs.
It would be cool if there was a phone that could hop on any open 802.11 network and talk to a remote VoIP server, however it would be difficult to judge the bandwidth capabilities of the local network. It wouldn't work well. VoIP is tricky, QoS plays a large role.
Nice! Did not know about search.yahoo.com! Learn something new every post.
This weekend I was looking for some software that would be used for live performance midi work under Windows. My goal was to control lights/lasers, but none the less I noticed when searching google most of the results were crap pages setup to rank high on google.
I turned to Yahoo's search, and found much better results with less fake keyword filled pages. This is the 3rd time recently I've discovered this.
Is google a victim of it's own success? I love the uncrowded google page, this is what attracted me to google in the first place. Now I'm starting to wonder what I'm missing by relying solely on google. Yahoo responded quickly, although the site is crowded.
Thoughts?