I have a similar experience, although there is some stuff I would like to do that's a pain:
* Photo managment with Shotwell -- not enough local storage * Video editing with PiTiVi -- not enough local storage or horsepower (not that I've tried, don't think crouton/xephyr support video acceleration)
I was going to leave an old PC on to remote into for stuff like that, but it's deciding to be unreliable and I need a way to automatically suspend it to save power.
V6 to DNS/NAT: you mean NAT64? It's a thing. It works.
But what we'll probably end up with is Carrier Grade NAT for IPv4, hopefully dual-stacked with native IPv6. There are already ISPs selling CGN IPv4 connections with no IPv6 support, e.g. most cellular IP service.
Wow. I'm in a small city (43,000 inhabitants) in New Zealand, and have fibre at home. NZD99/mo, 30Mbps down, 10Mbps up, really unlimited, no "fair use clause." I could pay another NZD30/mo if I wanted 100Mbps down, 50Mbps up, and those prices are likely to come down pretty soon. The government is funding a rollout of the fibre network to most of the country's urban population.
If I wasn't in a fibre area there's a 50% chance (providing I was urban) I could get VDSL. And if not, I'd still be able to get 10Mbps ADSL2 unless I was somewhere semi-rural, at which point the speeds degrade to what you're getting in Seattle.
I've been to the USA. Your cellular networks have terrible reception -- I remember having no reception in a restaurant in downtown San Francisco -- and are far too expensive. Just as your ISPs are capping your previously unlimited fixed-line connections, ours are uncapping theirs.
It's only available on a pay-per-month plan (which you can get without a term contract). So I can have a phone on a plan, and share with other SIMs/devices that are on prepay, which is $0/month if you don't make calls, or send SMSes.
As Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microprocessor#Gilbert_Hyatt) says:
Gilbert Hyatt was awarded a patent claiming an invention pre-dating both TI and Intel, describing a "microcontroller".[9] The patent was later invalidated, but not before substantial royalties were paid out.[10][11]
"This patent was later invalidated in a patent interference case brought forth by Texas Instruments, on account that the device it described was never implemented and was not implementable with the technology available at the time of the invention. "
I know that 1990 (when that microprocessor patent was granted) is pre-Slashdot, but srsly, what's happening when patent trolls' whinging is front page news here?
I have no mod points, so take this as a "me too". CS conferences have prestige and a high impact value -- and the papers in the proceedings are full papers, not just abstracts.
In some other fields (a friend of mine tells me this is what biology is like), conference talks may be submitted with just an abstract, and the proceedings may not contain much more than Powerpoint slides. I've never seen a CS conference where that would be considered remotely acceptable practice.
ISDN has two 64kbps B channels, for audio/data, and one 16kbps D channel, for signalling. You can run a data call using either one or two B channels.
Claiming the service is either 144kbps or 78kbps is pure marketing, as the D channel will not be used for the data portion of the call -- you won't be able to push more than 64kbps or 128kbps of PPP through.
The trick is to have the lines providers wholesale to the retail ISPs/etc, who then provide CPE. If the service doesn't work, the end user's contract is with their retail service provider, who has to sort it out, no matter where the problem is. That's how it works here in New Zealand on our fancy new fibre network that's slowly replacing the old copper phone network. It's mostly how it worked on the old copper network, too.
My ISP (Orcon) provide CPE (a router with voice ports) that plugs into the fibre company's ONT. If the internet or phone doesn't work, it's Orcon's problem. I don't have a contractual relationship with the fibre company so if it's the fibre that's down, it's still Orcon's problem as far as I'm concerned.
Arguably you could use some too. Not everyone hates GNOME3 with a passion. Yes it's different and not what you're used to, but that doesn't mean it's bad and wrong and that this needs to be "admitted".
Ok so what I was trying to say was two things -- religion can cause people to do good things, and that disagreeing with other parts of a group you are in (by choice or not) is a normal part of human existence.
I'm not claiming that being religious is a prerequisite for recognising other people as human beings. But if you're claiming "99% of religious people are insane" it would suggest that maybe you are not thinking of those people as human beings, merely wrong-thinking automatons.
That's your opinion, that 99% of religious people are crazy. You're welcome to believe that. Demonise them all you want. Sure, we can be a mixed bag. But religious people I know feed the hungry, house the homeless, and give a caring ear to people locked away in prison who need someone stable and normal to talk to. And part of that is because of their religion. Not because they feel obligated to do these things to earn God Points, to be redeemed for quality of housing in the afterlife. But because they believe that it's the right thing to do -- that they are merely passing on the love they recieve from their creator to those around them who really need it. They may be crazy but the craziness doesn't sound like its results are something I'd want to discourage.
You appear to be widening "no true scotsman" from "no true christian" to "no true religious person"... which is casting the net so wide it's getting close to suggesting that you are a member of the right thinking set, and everyone else is a member of the wrong thinking set. And those other people (why does it always have to be other people) are wrong and evil and can be tarred with one big bad brush. They *all* hate teh gays, they all want to blow us up, they all vote for the wrong person, they all...
This is quite similar thinking to that used to demonise teh gays, people with the wrong colour skin, foreigners and immigrants, poor people, rich people, people who vote for the other guy (at least seemingly in the US). They're all still people, and keeping up the lie that they're different and bad really only works if you carefully avoid getting to know them (or make special dispensation for the ones you do). If everyone who disagrees with you has to be fought, you're going to end up with a very boring circle of friends, and the world will be that much poorer.
No True Scotsman is a crappy fallacy people knowing nothing of church history (hint: there's a *lot* of dissent in it) love to throw at Christians complaining that "too many of us have lost the plot" and please don't judge us all by that lot.
It's pretty common to be part of a group and not want to be thought of as being like members of that group whose actions/beliefs/etc you disapprove of. Think of it like being a US citizen who doesn't approve of your government's actions, or indeed those of your fellow countrymen, and is at pains to tell people from outside your country that "we're not all like that".
So accept that any group will have dissent, and when it is mentioned shouting "NO TRUE SCOTSMAN LA LA LA I CAN'T HEAR YOU" may be a little childish.
As an ISP you need to provision your links to cope with peak time load. Limiting data transfer reduces customer's link utilisation, so they are less likely to use all their link's bandwidth at the same time.
Peak bandwidth costs because you have to buy transit to that level (minus peering, but unless you're big, peering won't get you that much). Your routers have to be big enough to cope with that traffic level. The links inside your network, getting traffic between your customers' premises and your transit providers/peering points need to cope with that level of traffic. And if those customer connections go through someone else's infrastructure (e.g. a telco's DSLAMs and associated backhaul) you'll be paying for that too, and not at rates you can control by buying better gear to go at the ends of a fibre link.
In New Zealand we've always had data caps, mostly because bits of glass under the ocean cost a fair bit. We used to have them on dial-up connections. Several times ISPs have tried to offer uncapped broadband connections, and they've until the last year or so always ended in disaster.
How have they solved the problem? Mostly clever traffic management -- forcing you to use less of the 15 megabits of DSL last mile link, by slowing down non-interactive traffic during peak load. Ever decreasing bandwidth costs, and a different cost structure for access via the incumbent telco's DSL network, will also have played a part.
Any uncapped connection is going to be sold as rated at a low speed, traffic managed to be slow at peak load, or really expensive. You can buy dedicated, or at least low-contention bandwidth... that's what ISPs and large businesses do. Just don't ask for 15 megabits of low contention internet for the price you pay for a consumer DSL connection: people will laugh at you. 3 years ago I was getting quoted prices of around $1000NZD/mo ($850USD, ish) for a 4Mbps office internet connection. It'll be less now, and obviously as your connection size goes up, the price per megabit goes down. So if you want a connection that can run at its maximum rate, all the time, you can buy one. You just probably can't afford one.
The economics will be different in the US -- wholesale bandwidth will be cheaper. But last miles cost money, routers cost money, backhaul costs money.
And 3G/cellular networks are an even better illustration of this -- there, the last mile is an RF interface shared with a bunch of subscribers. Selling you a 5GB capped connection means you won't torrent incessantly -- at 21Mbps you may be using all (or maybe, just half) of the available bandwidth in your location. Which will make the network slow for everyone else, who will complain that they're paying for 21Mbps and getting 1Mbps or less.
Looks like I'm wrong -- see what happens when you trust your own memory over Google/Wikipedia? Someone clearly lied to me in my youth when they told me it was referring to our town:-(
Did Apple really do the high DPI display R&D? I thought they bought the displays from Samsung and LG (and maybe others), and that those displays varied in quality, suggesting that each manufacturer has their own process rather than just doing what uncle Apple tells them to.
I have an AMD motherboard with integrated Radeon graphics. Yeah, the open source drivers aren't as fast as the binary ones -- but I could do with playing less minecraft anyway. And wow, I can upgrade the system and not worry about graphics drivers breaking things.
You'd think so, but they're often enough caught up in the culture wars to vote for the other guy anyway.
I assume you're in the USA and need reminding that your defense and agricultural industries are hugely dependent on government funding or subsidies, but somehow get missed in the "government needs to spend less" arguments.
Of course, if you ran Linux, you could have this now (sort of) -- it's possible to run full Linux on a rooted android phone, and with MHL you can tether it to a display. Imagine something like the padfone with a keyboard dock...
* You could get more than 8KHz. But the number of PWM steps you had was 1.193180MHz / sampling frequency - so only 54 at 22.050KHz. The higher sampling frequencies made the PWM "whine" less audible. * As long as you called the original timer interrupt code at the correct frequency (1.193180MHz / 65536, ~18Hz) the system clock would stay accurate. Of course, if you failed to do this, it wouldn't.
Slashdot Mirror
I have a similar experience, although there is some stuff I would like to do that's a pain:
* Photo managment with Shotwell -- not enough local storage
* Video editing with PiTiVi -- not enough local storage or horsepower (not that I've tried, don't think crouton/xephyr support video acceleration)
I was going to leave an old PC on to remote into for stuff like that, but it's deciding to be unreliable and I need a way to automatically suspend it to save power.
V6 to DNS/NAT: you mean NAT64? It's a thing. It works.
But what we'll probably end up with is Carrier Grade NAT for IPv4, hopefully dual-stacked with native IPv6. There are already ISPs selling CGN IPv4 connections with no IPv6 support, e.g. most cellular IP service.
All our [NZ] ISPs seem to be falling over themselves to offer uncapped service at the moment, often with no "fair use" clause.
Move here. It's not that hard. If you need an IT job, my employer is hiring.
Wow. I'm in a small city (43,000 inhabitants) in New Zealand, and have fibre at home. NZD99/mo, 30Mbps down, 10Mbps up, really unlimited, no "fair use clause." I could pay another NZD30/mo if I wanted 100Mbps down, 50Mbps up, and those prices are likely to come down pretty soon. The government is funding a rollout of the fibre network to most of the country's urban population.
If I wasn't in a fibre area there's a 50% chance (providing I was urban) I could get VDSL. And if not, I'd still be able to get 10Mbps ADSL2 unless I was somewhere semi-rural, at which point the speeds degrade to what you're getting in Seattle.
I've been to the USA. Your cellular networks have terrible reception -- I remember having no reception in a restaurant in downtown San Francisco -- and are far too expensive. Just as your ISPs are capping your previously unlimited fixed-line connections, ours are uncapping theirs.
I've bleached ceilings with a mop. I may not be a reasonable person, though, merely one that used to live in a damp, moldy house.
The carrier "2 degrees mobile" in New Zealand does this. They call it "shared data".
http://www.2degreesmobile.co.n...
It's only available on a pay-per-month plan (which you can get without a term contract). So I can have a phone on a plan, and share with other SIMs/devices that are on prepay, which is $0/month if you don't make calls, or send SMSes.
As Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microprocessor#Gilbert_Hyatt) says:
Gilbert Hyatt was awarded a patent claiming an invention pre-dating both TI and Intel, describing a "microcontroller".[9] The patent was later invalidated, but not before substantial royalties were paid out.[10][11]
And from http://www.intel4004.com/hyatt...:
"This patent was later invalidated in a patent interference case brought forth by Texas Instruments, on account that the device it described was never implemented and was not implementable with the technology available at the time of the invention. "
I know that 1990 (when that microprocessor patent was granted) is pre-Slashdot, but srsly, what's happening when patent trolls' whinging is front page news here?
I have no mod points, so take this as a "me too". CS conferences have prestige and a high impact value -- and the papers in the proceedings are full papers, not just abstracts.
In some other fields (a friend of mine tells me this is what biology is like), conference talks may be submitted with just an abstract, and the proceedings may not contain much more than Powerpoint slides. I've never seen a CS conference where that would be considered remotely acceptable practice.
ISDN has two 64kbps B channels, for audio/data, and one 16kbps D channel, for signalling. You can run a data call using either one or two B channels.
Claiming the service is either 144kbps or 78kbps is pure marketing, as the D channel will not be used for the data portion of the call -- you won't be able to push more than 64kbps or 128kbps of PPP through.
The trick is to have the lines providers wholesale to the retail ISPs/etc, who then provide CPE. If the service doesn't work, the end user's contract is with their retail service provider, who has to sort it out, no matter where the problem is. That's how it works here in New Zealand on our fancy new fibre network that's slowly replacing the old copper phone network. It's mostly how it worked on the old copper network, too.
My ISP (Orcon) provide CPE (a router with voice ports) that plugs into the fibre company's ONT. If the internet or phone doesn't work, it's Orcon's problem. I don't have a contractual relationship with the fibre company so if it's the fibre that's down, it's still Orcon's problem as far as I'm concerned.
Yes but EC2 costs way more than a cheapo VPS of the type advertised on lowendbox.com
What counts as a failed law? Also "unholy" has only one "l".
Arguably you could use some too. Not everyone hates GNOME3 with a passion. Yes it's different and not what you're used to, but that doesn't mean it's bad and wrong and that this needs to be "admitted".
Ok so what I was trying to say was two things -- religion can cause people to do good things, and that disagreeing with other parts of a group you are in (by choice or not) is a normal part of human existence.
I'm not claiming that being religious is a prerequisite for recognising other people as human beings. But if you're claiming "99% of religious people are insane" it would suggest that maybe you are not thinking of those people as human beings, merely wrong-thinking automatons.
That's your opinion, that 99% of religious people are crazy. You're welcome to believe that. Demonise them all you want. Sure, we can be a mixed bag. But religious people I know feed the hungry, house the homeless, and give a caring ear to people locked away in prison who need someone stable and normal to talk to. And part of that is because of their religion. Not because they feel obligated to do these things to earn God Points, to be redeemed for quality of housing in the afterlife. But because they believe that it's the right thing to do -- that they are merely passing on the love they recieve from their creator to those around them who really need it. They may be crazy but the craziness doesn't sound like its results are something I'd want to discourage.
You appear to be widening "no true scotsman" from "no true christian" to "no true religious person"... which is casting the net so wide it's getting close to suggesting that you are a member of the right thinking set, and everyone else is a member of the wrong thinking set. And those other people (why does it always have to be other people) are wrong and evil and can be tarred with one big bad brush. They *all* hate teh gays, they all want to blow us up, they all vote for the wrong person, they all ...
This is quite similar thinking to that used to demonise teh gays, people with the wrong colour skin, foreigners and immigrants, poor people, rich people, people who vote for the other guy (at least seemingly in the US). They're all still people, and keeping up the lie that they're different and bad really only works if you carefully avoid getting to know them (or make special dispensation for the ones you do). If everyone who disagrees with you has to be fought, you're going to end up with a very boring circle of friends, and the world will be that much poorer.
No True Scotsman is a crappy fallacy people knowing nothing of church history (hint: there's a *lot* of dissent in it) love to throw at Christians complaining that "too many of us have lost the plot" and please don't judge us all by that lot.
It's pretty common to be part of a group and not want to be thought of as being like members of that group whose actions/beliefs/etc you disapprove of. Think of it like being a US citizen who doesn't approve of your government's actions, or indeed those of your fellow countrymen, and is at pains to tell people from outside your country that "we're not all like that".
So accept that any group will have dissent, and when it is mentioned shouting "NO TRUE SCOTSMAN LA LA LA I CAN'T HEAR YOU" may be a little childish.
Bandwidth and transfer are not the same thing.
As an ISP you need to provision your links to cope with peak time load. Limiting data transfer reduces customer's link utilisation, so they are less likely to use all their link's bandwidth at the same time.
Peak bandwidth costs because you have to buy transit to that level (minus peering, but unless you're big, peering won't get you that much). Your routers have to be big enough to cope with that traffic level. The links inside your network, getting traffic between your customers' premises and your transit providers/peering points need to cope with that level of traffic. And if those customer connections go through someone else's infrastructure (e.g. a telco's DSLAMs and associated backhaul) you'll be paying for that too, and not at rates you can control by buying better gear to go at the ends of a fibre link.
In New Zealand we've always had data caps, mostly because bits of glass under the ocean cost a fair bit. We used to have them on dial-up connections. Several times ISPs have tried to offer uncapped broadband connections, and they've until the last year or so always ended in disaster.
How have they solved the problem? Mostly clever traffic management -- forcing you to use less of the 15 megabits of DSL last mile link, by slowing down non-interactive traffic during peak load. Ever decreasing bandwidth costs, and a different cost structure for access via the incumbent telco's DSL network, will also have played a part.
Any uncapped connection is going to be sold as rated at a low speed, traffic managed to be slow at peak load, or really expensive. You can buy dedicated, or at least low-contention bandwidth... that's what ISPs and large businesses do. Just don't ask for 15 megabits of low contention internet for the price you pay for a consumer DSL connection: people will laugh at you. 3 years ago I was getting quoted prices of around $1000NZD/mo ($850USD, ish) for a 4Mbps office internet connection. It'll be less now, and obviously as your connection size goes up, the price per megabit goes down. So if you want a connection that can run at its maximum rate, all the time, you can buy one. You just probably can't afford one.
The economics will be different in the US -- wholesale bandwidth will be cheaper. But last miles cost money, routers cost money, backhaul costs money.
And 3G/cellular networks are an even better illustration of this -- there, the last mile is an RF interface shared with a bunch of subscribers. Selling you a 5GB capped connection means you won't torrent incessantly -- at 21Mbps you may be using all (or maybe, just half) of the available bandwidth in your location. Which will make the network slow for everyone else, who will complain that they're paying for 21Mbps and getting 1Mbps or less.
Looks like I'm wrong -- see what happens when you trust your own memory over Google/Wikipedia? Someone clearly lied to me in my youth when they told me it was referring to our town :-(
You do realise no one outside of New Zealand will get that joke...
Did Apple really do the high DPI display R&D? I thought they bought the displays from Samsung and LG (and maybe others), and that those displays varied in quality, suggesting that each manufacturer has their own process rather than just doing what uncle Apple tells them to.
Me too.
I have an AMD motherboard with integrated Radeon graphics. Yeah, the open source drivers aren't as fast as the binary ones -- but I could do with playing less minecraft anyway. And wow, I can upgrade the system and not worry about graphics drivers breaking things.
My netbook has an Intel GPU. Same situation.
Thanks, AMD/ATI!
You'd think so, but they're often enough caught up in the culture wars to vote for the other guy anyway.
I assume you're in the USA and need reminding that your defense and agricultural industries are hugely dependent on government funding or subsidies, but somehow get missed in the "government needs to spend less" arguments.
Of course, if you ran Linux, you could have this now (sort of) -- it's possible to run full Linux on a rooted android phone, and with MHL you can tether it to a display. Imagine something like the padfone with a keyboard dock...
From a pedant who remembers how this worked:
* You could get more than 8KHz. But the number of PWM steps you had was 1.193180MHz / sampling frequency - so only 54 at 22.050KHz. The higher sampling frequencies made the PWM "whine" less audible.
* As long as you called the original timer interrupt code at the correct frequency (1.193180MHz / 65536, ~18Hz) the system clock would stay accurate. Of course, if you failed to do this, it wouldn't.
It's also not that good a story. It's exposition with poor narrative bolted on. Marshall Brain is, alas, not Aldous Huxley.