I will stop attacking Microsoft when they do the following:
Stop treating me like a criminal -- get rid of WPA.
Stop treating me like a criminal -- get rid of DRM (and the whole "trusted" thing).
Stop behaving like a criminal -- get out of the "protection racket" by forcing me to pay money to make Windows secure.
Stop behaving like a criminal -- play fairly with other companies.
I think that a good first step would be to fire the entire legal department. Let a tech company be run by geeks. If they do all of this, they might get me back as a happy paying customer.
Tomorrow's news: A guy figures out how to use a wall-wart power supply, thereby avoiding spinning a hard drive and decreasing the heat in the room even more.
In next week's news: A guy puts a cup of ice in front of the fan for even more X-treme cooling. You have to use the "X-treme" because it points out how really radical this idea is.
Ok,/.. You just took five minutes of my life. I want it back! I even had to go to Mirrordot to see this bit of moronic stupidity.
Some people want to blame guns for violence, but one little book called the "Communist Manifesto" is responsible countless deaths.
Also, there was this guy named Ghandi with an idea. Ever hear of Martin Luther? Or how about Martin Luther King Jr.? All of those were just otherwise ordinary guys who had ideas that changed their countries.
I am not an expert on Africa. However, I get the impression that part of their problem is environmental (climate, drought, etc.) but part is in-fighting, genocide, corruption, and political instability. Education cannot change the environment, but it CAN spread ideas and combat the other problems. History has shown that one powerful leader at just the right time can make a huge difference. If these laptops can help to shape just one child who will grow up and be a leader who promotes peace and honesty, that will be well worth the effort.
I wish that FTP would die. Sending passwords in plain text sucks. The way that is uses ports makes headaches for NAT boxes.
Well, maybe not "die." Maybe just replaced with something functionally equivalent, but that works better. And, no, HTTP is not a good replacment -- unless somebody can show me an easy way to copy a directory of a hundred files with one click over a web browser.
I am not saying that it HAS not use, but it is an evolutionary dead-end. Usenet could hang on for another 20 years. But, AFAIK, no new uses are being developed for it. It is probably loosing users a lot faster than it is gaining (except maybe the "alt.binary.*" secion, but that is for other reasons).
You can get web and e-mail on your phone. Companies are developing small PDA-sized tablet computers to access the web and e-mail. When have you heard of a news reader for a phone?
My guess is that porn and warez is the ONLY reason that usenet still exists. Yes, I know that there are some useful groups, but with the low traffic that those get, they could esily be moved to web forums. The only real advantage of a usenet forum is that the bandwidth is distributed, so that you do not have one "host" being stuck with the bill.
It is not that I am biased against usenet. If you search back far enough, I even have a post or two on "alt.swedish.chef.bork.bork.bork." But I fail to see the need for it any more.
Well, it is not DEAD, but it is dying. The average person does not use/need usenet. Newbies can be on the internet for a couple of years without even hearing about usenet. Withing a decade it is likely to go the way of Gopher.
Off-topic, but I wish that I could take a poll to see how many slashdotters have ever used gopher.
Back to the topic. To me, "alt.*" is like an outlaw wasteland. It is not a "nice" place to visit. The moderated areas are nice, but the same thing is often found on internet forums, so I do not really see the need for those.
The funny thing is that the "alt.*" areas remind me a bit of e-mail. You never know who is posting, you never know who to trust, and there is a lot of spam. Really, "alt.*" is like e-mail except everybody has the same in-box.
Sometimes you simply can't patch things any more, and it is time to start over. Even Microsoft realized this and moved from a DOS core to an NT core on XP. Apple realized this and moved from 6800 to PowerPC to X86.
The solution? For some novel open-source software to appear that handles this problem. Then it gets integrated into Thunderbird as an OPTION for a way to send mail. It should work seamlessly, and fall back to old-fashioned e-mail when necessary. You would have two e-mail accounts side-by-side, but it would appear to the user as if they had only one.
So the geeks will be on the bleeding edge. Everybody reading this would probably have it. As time goes by, more and more people using Thunderbird woudl switch. Then Opera would join it. Once it gets big enough, even Microsoft would sit up and take notice after hearing about how great it is ("embrace-extend-extinguish" begins with "embrace").
It done right, and if the right players were involved, it could work.
Encryption is in software. Don't forget that this thing has a MONTH to decrypt the informational content of four DVDs. Even a 100 Mhz Pentium could manage that.
Closed captioning is a brain-dead protocol. I do not even think that there is as much as a parity bit in there.
But, for something like this, you would use fun little tricks like trellis codes, turbo codes, and convolutional codes. You would be surprised how well this can work. In satellite work, using such tricks along with a few others makes it possible to recover a signal that is even below the noise floor. Cool stuff.
Plus, you can do all sorts of fancy things like send an XOR of two different blocks in the movie. Then, as long as you have one you can recover the other. That means that for sending an extra 50% of a movie's data, you can recover ANY block in there, and most likely recover several blocks.
Also, by simply adding a CRC to every block, the box can tell you how well the movie was received. If the box says that you can watch a movie but that 10 seconds are hosed you at least have full information and can make a choice.
But, back to the original topic...
This seems pretty cool. The neat thing is that they can provide movies and bypass the service providers. Their target market is 100% of the country. If they can offer a lower price than pay-per-view on cable or satellite, they stand a shot at making it.
Read the original post (I guess you could not call it TFA since it is not really an article). Take that same "85MPH" and take it back to the dealer. Trade it in for the "60MPH" model. Now, all of a sudden you go slower even in slow traffic!
I understand what the origianl post was saying. If external congestion is limiting the bandwidth to 750Kbps, then he downgraded to 768Kbps service, and suddenly he was getting 300Kbps. He brings up a valid point.
There COULD be congestion. The best way to test that would be to do a speed test at 3:00 in the morning. Then, if he did not get anywhere close to full speed, that is a problem.
Selling a service as 7000Mbps, you would assume that you could actually hit 700Mbps at least sometimes.
One more comment: The 700Mbps is most likely the raw bit speed. Ethernet adds some overhead, so actual download speed would likely be about 15% to 20% less -- but certainly not consistently 50% less.
There is supposedly a six-month cycle, but this one slipped two months. Will Eft be in another four months (6.10, back to the original schedule), or will it be released six months from today (6.12)?
A NAT is like a big locked door. Nobody can get in -- unless you OPEN the door first. NAT will not protect from people getting drive-by installs as they search for porn. Nor will it stop people from downloading a P2P app that loads them down with nasty spyware.
But, in the hands of an experienced user, a NAT is great protection, as long as the user is careful. Unfortunately, they are not fool-proof, as the world keeps on making better fools.
Oh well. I should not be too hard on people. Some guys who know nothing about avoiding mal-ware could rebuild an engine. I can change starters and alternaters, but that's about it. I guess we all have our priorities.
I was thinking of getting my PS3 lowered with a new set of shocks, a few flame decals, some neon lighting on the undercarriage, leather grips for the controller, and a new set of subwoofers.
You may be joking, but I bet that it will only take a month after the PS3 is released before somebody does this and posts pictures on the net.
'tis funny to watch, though. What happens when all of the modders discover girls and suddenly find something better to do with their time?
Not that I have tried recently, but I thought that the multiplier is only locked not to go ABOVE a certain value. I thought that you could always go down. At least that is my experience with Athlon 64s. I have never tried with an Athlon XP.
NASLite is a "free taste" of commercial software. They give you just enough to show you that it works. If you want any extra features, you have to pony up some money.
If you have a "overclocking" mobo, you can probably quite easily underclock it as well. If, on the other hand, your mobo says "Dell" on it, then you probably don't have access to the BIOS screens necessary to do that. You can find Windows software that might be able to do the job (depending upon chipset), but who runs Windows for a NAS server? But, with that being said, modern hardware is better. Taking an Athlon 64 and cranking the clock speed down by a factor of 10 and dropping the core voltage is likely to be a lot more efficient than taking an old 400MHz P-2 and reducing the clock speed by 1/2. So, you throw more expensive hardware at the problem in order to consume less power.
This is just and educated guess, though. I am not an expert.
Gigabit ethernet is pretty rare on the type of old hardware that typically gets pressed into NAS usage. It would not take too much processing horsepower to saturate a 100 Mb/s link. If, on the other hand, you system has gigabit built-in, I suspect that it has a processor attached that can handle it.
But, if you are the type of guy to attach a PCI gigabit ethernet port to an old P-3, then the processor might not be able to keep up.
And now for something completely different...
There are distos like FreeNAS that do one thing well. There are other distros that can also do broadband router functions. Does anybody know of anything that does both? I will spare you the details, but I would like one box that can do NAS duty (NFS and Samba), and act as a router. The computer will have three ethernet ports -- one for cable modem, one for the switch to the wired LAN, and one for the wireless AP. I know that I could roll-my-own by using (insert favorite distro here), but that would take me longer to learn how to set up than I have right now, especially with my wife's business (see signature below). Something with a point-n-drool interface that is web-administered would be perfect. Bonus points for print server. Any suggestions?
Exactly. We need more education here. More of the "right vs. wrong" type, instead of the "if it feels good, do it." Hey, it feel REAL good to have somebody hand you $100,000 in a briefcase, but it's probably wrong.
Slashdot Mirror
- Stop treating me like a criminal -- get rid of WPA.
- Stop treating me like a criminal -- get rid of DRM (and the whole "trusted" thing).
- Stop behaving like a criminal -- get out of the "protection racket" by forcing me to pay money to make Windows secure.
- Stop behaving like a criminal -- play fairly with other companies.
I think that a good first step would be to fire the entire legal department. Let a tech company be run by geeks.If they do all of this, they might get me back as a happy paying customer.
Tomorrow's news: A guy figures out how to use a wall-wart power supply, thereby avoiding spinning a hard drive and decreasing the heat in the room even more.
/.. You just took five minutes of my life. I want it back! I even had to go to Mirrordot to see this bit of moronic stupidity.
In next week's news: A guy puts a cup of ice in front of the fan for even more X-treme cooling. You have to use the "X-treme" because it points out how really radical this idea is.
Ok,
Let me inform you...
The most powerful thing in the world is an idea.
Some people want to blame guns for violence, but one little book called the "Communist Manifesto" is responsible countless deaths.
Also, there was this guy named Ghandi with an idea. Ever hear of Martin Luther? Or how about Martin Luther King Jr.? All of those were just otherwise ordinary guys who had ideas that changed their countries.
I am not an expert on Africa. However, I get the impression that part of their problem is environmental (climate, drought, etc.) but part is in-fighting, genocide, corruption, and political instability. Education cannot change the environment, but it CAN spread ideas and combat the other problems. History has shown that one powerful leader at just the right time can make a huge difference. If these laptops can help to shape just one child who will grow up and be a leader who promotes peace and honesty, that will be well worth the effort.
Actually, now that you mention it, Ubuntu would be a perfect fit for this machine just because of the color scheme.
I love Ubuntu, but I hate the colors.
Yeah, right. I want one, and my kids can't have it.
OK. I might have to buy one for them too.
Yeah, but nobody looks at their digital camera with a black cloth covering their heads.
Oh, wait. With the readability of some of those LCDs in bright sunlight, that is not a bad idea. Coming soon to a Best Buy near you...
Do most ISPs support this?
I wish that FTP would die. Sending passwords in plain text sucks. The way that is uses ports makes headaches for NAT boxes.
Well, maybe not "die." Maybe just replaced with something functionally equivalent, but that works better. And, no, HTTP is not a good replacment -- unless somebody can show me an easy way to copy a directory of a hundred files with one click over a web browser.
I am not saying that it HAS not use, but it is an evolutionary dead-end. Usenet could hang on for another 20 years. But, AFAIK, no new uses are being developed for it. It is probably loosing users a lot faster than it is gaining (except maybe the "alt.binary.*" secion, but that is for other reasons).
You can get web and e-mail on your phone. Companies are developing small PDA-sized tablet computers to access the web and e-mail. When have you heard of a news reader for a phone?
My guess is that porn and warez is the ONLY reason that usenet still exists. Yes, I know that there are some useful groups, but with the low traffic that those get, they could esily be moved to web forums. The only real advantage of a usenet forum is that the bandwidth is distributed, so that you do not have one "host" being stuck with the bill.
It is not that I am biased against usenet. If you search back far enough, I even have a post or two on "alt.swedish.chef.bork.bork.bork." But I fail to see the need for it any more.
Well, it is not DEAD, but it is dying. The average person does not use/need usenet. Newbies can be on the internet for a couple of years without even hearing about usenet. Withing a decade it is likely to go the way of Gopher.
Off-topic, but I wish that I could take a poll to see how many slashdotters have ever used gopher.
Back to the topic. To me, "alt.*" is like an outlaw wasteland. It is not a "nice" place to visit. The moderated areas are nice, but the same thing is often found on internet forums, so I do not really see the need for those.
The funny thing is that the "alt.*" areas remind me a bit of e-mail. You never know who is posting, you never know who to trust, and there is a lot of spam. Really, "alt.*" is like e-mail except everybody has the same in-box.
Sometimes you simply can't patch things any more, and it is time to start over. Even Microsoft realized this and moved from a DOS core to an NT core on XP. Apple realized this and moved from 6800 to PowerPC to X86.
The solution? For some novel open-source software to appear that handles this problem. Then it gets integrated into Thunderbird as an OPTION for a way to send mail. It should work seamlessly, and fall back to old-fashioned e-mail when necessary. You would have two e-mail accounts side-by-side, but it would appear to the user as if they had only one.
So the geeks will be on the bleeding edge. Everybody reading this would probably have it. As time goes by, more and more people using Thunderbird woudl switch. Then Opera would join it. Once it gets big enough, even Microsoft would sit up and take notice after hearing about how great it is ("embrace-extend-extinguish" begins with "embrace").
It done right, and if the right players were involved, it could work.
Encryption is in software. Don't forget that this thing has a MONTH to decrypt the informational content of four DVDs. Even a 100 Mhz Pentium could manage that.
Closed captioning is a brain-dead protocol. I do not even think that there is as much as a parity bit in there.
But, for something like this, you would use fun little tricks like trellis codes, turbo codes, and convolutional codes. You would be surprised how well this can work. In satellite work, using such tricks along with a few others makes it possible to recover a signal that is even below the noise floor. Cool stuff.
Plus, you can do all sorts of fancy things like send an XOR of two different blocks in the movie. Then, as long as you have one you can recover the other. That means that for sending an extra 50% of a movie's data, you can recover ANY block in there, and most likely recover several blocks.
Also, by simply adding a CRC to every block, the box can tell you how well the movie was received. If the box says that you can watch a movie but that 10 seconds are hosed you at least have full information and can make a choice.
But, back to the original topic...
This seems pretty cool. The neat thing is that they can provide movies and bypass the service providers. Their target market is 100% of the country. If they can offer a lower price than pay-per-view on cable or satellite, they stand a shot at making it.
Read the original post (I guess you could not call it TFA since it is not really an article). Take that same "85MPH" and take it back to the dealer. Trade it in for the "60MPH" model. Now, all of a sudden you go slower even in slow traffic!
I understand what the origianl post was saying. If external congestion is limiting the bandwidth to 750Kbps, then he downgraded to 768Kbps service, and suddenly he was getting 300Kbps. He brings up a valid point.
There COULD be congestion. The best way to test that would be to do a speed test at 3:00 in the morning. Then, if he did not get anywhere close to full speed, that is a problem.
Selling a service as 7000Mbps, you would assume that you could actually hit 700Mbps at least sometimes.
One more comment: The 700Mbps is most likely the raw bit speed. Ethernet adds some overhead, so actual download speed would likely be about 15% to 20% less -- but certainly not consistently 50% less.
There is supposedly a six-month cycle, but this one slipped two months. Will Eft be in another four months (6.10, back to the original schedule), or will it be released six months from today (6.12)?
A NAT is like a big locked door. Nobody can get in -- unless you OPEN the door first. NAT will not protect from people getting drive-by installs as they search for porn. Nor will it stop people from downloading a P2P app that loads them down with nasty spyware.
But, in the hands of an experienced user, a NAT is great protection, as long as the user is careful. Unfortunately, they are not fool-proof, as the world keeps on making better fools.
Oh well. I should not be too hard on people. Some guys who know nothing about avoiding mal-ware could rebuild an engine. I can change starters and alternaters, but that's about it. I guess we all have our priorities.
'tis funny to watch, though. What happens when all of the modders discover girls and suddenly find something better to do with their time?
Not that I have tried recently, but I thought that the multiplier is only locked not to go ABOVE a certain value. I thought that you could always go down. At least that is my experience with Athlon 64s. I have never tried with an Athlon XP.
NASLite is a "free taste" of commercial software. They give you just enough to show you that it works. If you want any extra features, you have to pony up some money.
It is called "underclocking"...
If you have a "overclocking" mobo, you can probably quite easily underclock it as well. If, on the other hand, your mobo says "Dell" on it, then you probably don't have access to the BIOS screens necessary to do that. You can find Windows software that might be able to do the job (depending upon chipset), but who runs Windows for a NAS server?
But, with that being said, modern hardware is better. Taking an Athlon 64 and cranking the clock speed down by a factor of 10 and dropping the core voltage is likely to be a lot more efficient than taking an old 400MHz P-2 and reducing the clock speed by 1/2. So, you throw more expensive hardware at the problem in order to consume less power.
This is just and educated guess, though. I am not an expert.
I am certainly not an expert on NAS...
Gigabit ethernet is pretty rare on the type of old hardware that typically gets pressed into NAS usage. It would not take too much processing horsepower to saturate a 100 Mb/s link. If, on the other hand, you system has gigabit built-in, I suspect that it has a processor attached that can handle it.
But, if you are the type of guy to attach a PCI gigabit ethernet port to an old P-3, then the processor might not be able to keep up.
And now for something completely different...
There are distos like FreeNAS that do one thing well. There are other distros that can also do broadband router functions. Does anybody know of anything that does both? I will spare you the details, but I would like one box that can do NAS duty (NFS and Samba), and act as a router. The computer will have three ethernet ports -- one for cable modem, one for the switch to the wired LAN, and one for the wireless AP. I know that I could roll-my-own by using (insert favorite distro here), but that would take me longer to learn how to set up than I have right now, especially with my wife's business (see signature below). Something with a point-n-drool interface that is web-administered would be perfect. Bonus points for print server. Any suggestions?
Easy. You can get solid-state 2.5" disc drives. http://www.simpletech.com/oem/ideflashdrive/index. php for one. Remove old hard drive, install new one. Install OS of choice. DISABLE VIRTUAL MEMORY. Done.
Of course, if you have to ask, you can't afford it.
Exactly. We need more education here. More of the "right vs. wrong" type, instead of the "if it feels good, do it." Hey, it feel REAL good to have somebody hand you $100,000 in a briefcase, but it's probably wrong.