It probably isn't as bad as you suggest. You shouldn't be seeing 30 to 40 connections to pages with modern (or at least future) browsers and servers. After getting the HTML, the popular browsers usually open up 4 to 7 concurrent connections which incur the round trip times in parallel and then reuse them for subsequent requests when possible.
I'm sorry, perhaps I wasn't clear when I said that I installed and used this setup. The particular site we were using was washingtonpost.com, which at the time averaged 50 objects per page. It wasn't the worst site out there (ICQ was much worse), but it definitely wasn't the smallest pagesize.
Even if you have 4 simultaneous connections and reuse them, you're still incurring large delays. To set up the TCP connection, you need a three way handshake. That is a minimum of 1.25 seconds (given.5 seconds for a round trip). Then, best case scenario, you send a request and get a response for another 1 second of latency, plus any latency present between the satellite headend and the website. Let's assume 40 objects on the page. So each connection has to get 10 objects in parallel with the other connections. So that's 1.25 seconds to set up the connection, and 1 second per image. That's 11.25 seconds of latency per page added by the satellite connection. Theoretically, if you send all the requests at the beginning of the connection, you can reduce that latency. However you still have a minimum added latency of 2.25 seconds, and it's questionable whether or not you can do that with current browsers (I personally don't know).
In contrast, if you open up a dialup connection to an ISP without caching or compression and pull washingtonpost.com's front page, it will take about 11 seconds to download and render the page. That number is based on a series of tests that I performed personally, using several different computers to make sure the number was accurate.
Also, if you're wondering where I got a half second for a round trip from, it's fairly simple. The satellite is located 22,500 miles above the equator. Given a best-case scenario with both you and the satellite headend on the equator, that's a one way trip from you to the headend of 45k miles, and a RT of 90k miles. The speed of light is 186,300 miles per second. So that gives a best-case latency of about a half a second.
It's just that it's not that commonly used. I installed a bidirectional, mobile satellite internet link 2 years ago, with T-1 speeds. Granted, not the cheapest thing to do, but it was still there. And it sucked, at least for web surfing, which was why we installed it. Unfortunately, we didn't have much of a choice since we needed a mobile solution, and Ricochet wasn't up to speed yet.
Typically, satellite data streams have about a half second latency. That means you send out a ping to your next hop, and it's at least 500ms before you get the response. Now when you're doing a stream of data in, this isn't so bad. You have a half second latency when you're setting up the connection, but then you have a nice even data delivery. However, for things like web surfing where you're setting up lots of connections (up to 30 or 40 per page sometimes), it's unbearable.
Satellite internet connections are useful if you're in a remote area and can't get anything else. But if you have anything else, even IDSL, you're going to find it a better choice for things like web surfing and gaming.
AOL uses some location specific dial pools. So quite a lot of the AOL users can actually be traced to a region.
Well, yes and no. I can't go into too much detail about the architecture, but any give "pool" of dialup IP addresses at AOL could be used by many dialup locations. The assignments of users to IP addresses are mostly done by round robin, not by location, since all the dialup connections are backhauled to AOL's datacenters.
The closest you could nail down an AOL dialup IP is to the datacenter. To get any geographic information on a user, you'd need to have access to AOL's internal databases, and they won't even give that to partners.
What effort? Actually remembering it was posted before and then plugging "poetictech" into the search box at the bottom of the page to get the link to the earlier post?
Welcome to the networked world, buddy. It's not like I went to the library to pull up the newspaper archives on microfiche and scan through them until I found the article.
And you read my fscking comment before you start bitching. Taco mentions that it was posted a couple years ago. One of those/. articles that I linked is about 7 months old, and the other is less than 2. And I looked at the site on both occassions, and it was the same design.
Now granted, I can't even get to the poetictech site to see if it's a "new" design, but I doubt it. Somehow I think it's the same one we saw before.
OK, so it's illegal to mirror and link DeCSS?
No problem. Let's all mirror and link DeCSS.
After a little searching, I found a site that has developed a nice smokescreen. It's a program, called DeCSS, which removes Cascading Style Sheets from HTML pages. Comes complete with a mirror and linking kit. Nothing illegal about that.
Check out my site for a DeCSS mirror and instructions.
Sure, it's easy enough for a company to interview for a specific skill set without getting into anything of their business. But that's only half of an interview. In any good interview, you are interviewing the company, as well as them interviewing you. And if this is a startup that feels they have some secrets that they don't want getting out until they're ready to announce it, then why shouldn't they have an NDA for you to sign?
I recently took a new position with a startup in Cambridge. When I was interviewing, I had to sign an NDA (really basic document, not full of legalease. Basically just a paragraph that says "please don't tell anyone else about this stuff. There's not much we can do if you choose to, but please don't do it."). I saw nothing wrong with this, since their whole business is based around a system the developed that noone has anything like yet, and they're not ready to announce to the general public.
Sure, go ahead and refuse the NDA. They can either not hire you, or go through the interview without telling you anything. But don't you *want* to know something about the company you're wanting to work for?
Personally, I'd just ignore this little change, like many people ignore the "don't run servers" rule. Why? @Home doesn't care.
How do I know this? Well, I was at a conference in DC last spring called Spam Summit. Basically, everyone involved with blocking spam, or opt-in (real opt-in, like MyPoints) advertising systems got together and talked about the technology. @Home did a big presentation on anti-spam things which happened to include some talking about their policies on people running servers.
The fact of the matter is that @Home just doesn't enforce the policy. The exec from @Home giving the presentation said very clearly that they don't routinely check for servers (excepting NNTP proxies, since they had that little problem with the UDP this past winter), and they really don't care if people run them as long as they are not causing problems. He defined problems as taking up too much bandwidth, or causing a security problem for @Home itself.
So I really don't think this is a cause for concern. I doubt they're gonna bother checking for these things (they'd have to sniff the network constantly... VPNs operate on arbitrary ports, and it's not like they can check for a server, since @Home users are gonna be VPN clients (for the most part).
Linux would be a nice change. I'm sure it would have less problems than Windows. However, I also wish they'd skip increasing the FSB speed, and work on the multiplier.
It's a well known fact of overclocking that increasing the FSB is a much less reliable method than increasing the multiplier. Why? Well, when you increase the FSB, you're driving all the devices in the system faster, and at non-standard clock rates as well. You stand a good chance of having the IDE or video controller stop the system. When you increase the multiplier, you're only touching the CPU.
He might have been able to get that Celeron up to 650 or possibly higher if he left the FSB alone and cranked the multiplier.
-Todd (running a Celeron 300a at 566 with a combination of multiplier and FSB increases, and air cooling only)
Since I just left AOL recently, I can say with some authority that this is not a fraud. I've actually looked at manda.office.aol.com when I was working there, and I've played with some of the Tokyo project software.
1) First, being, that www.inside-aol.com is obviously not an official or trust-worthy source of information.
2) I may be thinking of a different website but I believe that www.inside-aol.com has done hoaxes before.
True, however that doesn't mean it's immediately wrong.
3) The.jpg tells us nothing of the validity. So they took a screen shot? Whos to say they didn't compose that website, loaded it and then typed "http://manda.office.aol.com" in the Location bar and just didn't press return?
Absolutely. However, in this case that site does actually exist. It's internal to AOL, and not accessible outside. Likely they have an inside contact that sent them the screenshot. I don't believe you can access the office.aol.com network from the PCs in the lobby of the Reston and Dulles AOL offices.
4) Theres something of an informal nature about this website that reeks of hoax, its written in such a manner to imply something informal (read: "The Long awaited.. etc.. blah blah") yet it contains a dubious confidentiality clause at the begining ("Do not distribute or show..."). I dont think that "Do not show..." is common legalese.
Yes, it is a semi-informal site. It's an internal site, for AOL employees. This is not a site that was designed to be used by anyone outside the company, and the people who put it up are not web designers. The "confidentiality clause" at the top is not legalese. It's a reminder. Everyone who has access to view office.aol.com websites has already signed either NDAs (in the case of on-site vendors), or employment agreements that contain much stronger language.
Anyways, you can believe me if you want. I've seen that web site first hand, and can tell you that it's real.
I can accept the point that aol is perhaps easy to use but then WHY OH WHY couple it with linux. Whilst I love linux it really was a complete bugger to install and I still keep it for my server and run Win2k on my workstation.
Why? Well, let's just think about this. AOL wants to develop a bunch of "AOL Appliances". Things like the I-Opener (but I'm sure locked down better). Why the heck would they want to do this with a windows platform? Then they have to pay a license fee for windows for each and every device.
Why not just port the client to Linux, and put Linux on these appliances? No license fees for the OS, and the interface, to the user, is pretty much the same. That's what they've done.
I saw the Netscape plugin portion of the Tokyo project work when I was still working at AOL. This was probably about 6 months ago that I first looked at it, and it was pretty slick then. Had a few bugs, but it was good for an alpha. I never did get to Gamera, even though I heard a lot about it. Mostly because I never took the time to download it off the internal servers.
IIRC, AOL was moving towards using Gecko in the clients (and therefore Netscape/Mozilla) instead of IE. Most of the holdups were concerns over the agreements with MS that keep AOL on the desktop of fresh Windows installs. However, I seem to remember that as I was leaving, they sorted it out and were pushing ahead. Although, it was always discussed as making an interface to plug a third-party browser into AOL, and never about Netscape/Gecko specifically. But I didn't live in that part of the AOL house, so I could be mistaken.
Ah. I didn't realize that he was actually squatting. From the article on Slashdot, it sounded like he was using it for legitimate purposes.
I didn't read the link behind that one because it sounded like yet another case where the little guy got stepped on.
And as far as "It's a step in the right direction for WIPO" goes, sure... I agree with that. However, given WIPO's track record, I think it's gonna take a lot more than one case before we could truly say that they changed their tune.
If the data supports the claims that have been made over the years about cell phone radiation causing increased risk of cancer--and I'm not saying it *does* in fact do so, just that many people have claimed it--then the question will become how long have they known and have they been hiding it.
Well, I can't speak authoritatively on this, of course, but I used to work at the George Washington University Medical Center's Animal Research Lab (and before anyone jumps on my case, it was a very humane lab, and it was a work study position. I don't want to hear it.) doing administrative computer stuff that included a bit of data entry for a study on the effects of cell phone radiation on mice. IIRC, this was one of the larger such stdies, and it was a multi-year project.
Since I was working there in '95 and '96, that probably would have put the project completion around '98. Give another year for chewing on the data, internal meetings and such, and you'll prolly find that they only really completed things last year. However, I also remember that the study results, to that point, were mostly inconclusive. There really wasn't a higher incidence of tumors, malignant or otherwise, in the test groups as compared to the control groups.
I would suggest trying your local Goodwill. You probably know them better for having a store where you can buy donated stuff cheap. But, at least in my area, they also have classes in a variety of topics, including computers. If you feel up to it, you can always teach one of these.
And not only that, but you can donate your time in the Goodwill (or other charity) office helping with administrative computer stuff. When I was in college, during the summer when I didn't have classes, I used to work an 8 hour day on Wednesdays for nothing at Goodwill working on their administrative systems. Everything from PC support, to new installs, to supporting their database stuff. Chances are any charity in the area would love to have someone come in and help them out with this stuff for free (since most of the other people in the administrative office are paid).
Okay, now this would suck. You'd have to really like decorating in red:) Give the technology a few more years though to settle itself, and maybe this will be a reality.
This is my hope as well. Blue has pretty much always been a difficult color for LEDs and the like. And the fact that they can do something like this in blue at all is a big advancement. So hopefully we'll see some rapid development on the lifetime of the blue LEPs.
The way I read the article (the/. article, not the linked article), the poster thought that the concept of "electronic paper", so to speak, was the new technology. It is not. I provided links to stories about this technology. Yes, there are different implementations. Yes, the colors are a new thing. Yes, applying the polymer with an inkjet-like technology is neat. But that's beside the point.
Now, if you read the/. article differently, yay for you. Just goes to show how interpretation makes a difference.
Next time, you might want to be a little more tactful. You might be taken more seriously.
Until now, a major problem with semiconducting polymers has been that they oxidise and become discoloured when exposed to light. CDT has previously only been able to make green monochrome video displays. Now, CDT claims the red, green and blue LEPs in its new display are the first to have lifetimes long enough for use in consumer products. CDT's red LEP will work for 100 000 hours, green for 30 000 hours and blue for 1000 hours. But the company isn't saying how it has achieved these improvements.
"Seiko's research in Japan shows that a cellphone will only actually get 200 hours use per year," says Burroughes. "People replace their mobiles well before the current blue polymer lifetime of 1000 hours is reached." And further improvements in LEP lifetimes are expected, Burroughes says.
OK, so the display's only good for 1000 hours. I don't know about the rest of the world, but I keep my cell phone turned on 24 hours a day. So, if I do the math...
1000 hours / 24 hours per day = 41 1/3 days.
So it looks like I'll have to replace my cell phone every month and a half if it uses one of these displays. Doesn't seem that useful to me. Maybe they could have a red "screen saver" mode that would just use the red display elements unless you needed full color. That would at least give it a little better lifetime, since then their assumption that a cell phone is only "in use" 200 hours a year would be a little more valid.
However, I still think that a display that is only good for 1000 hours of use is probably not going to be that widely used at all. I mean, sure, the rest of the crowd here is talking about a lot of neat things:
paper thin TVs - How many hours of TV do *you* watch a day? More than 3? Then this display is dead in less than a year.
digital wallpaper - Do you really want to re-wallpaper your house every month and a half?
If the technology is cheap enough, then sure, it can be used for things like an electronic newspaper. I would really like to see that, actually. I'd pay $100 a year (assuming non-continuous usage here) for a thin, flexible display that gave me up to the minute news. Of course, you still need something to drive the display, and then you might be getting into something bulky. But the ideas are there. I just think that someone needs to worry about the 1000 hour lifetime of this technology, rather than just dismissing it.
Nothing new about this. Oooh, it's color. I bet that's just a *huge* accomplishment. Develop the technology in black, then change it to RGB and overlay them.
If I remember correctly, some researchers at MIT developed "digital ink" at least a couple years ago. Basically, a flexible thin display that you controlled in a similar fashion to an LCD screen.
It is amazing how M$ take some half decent ideas and botch them up. It is almost like running the 100m dash, but stopping at the 80m mark, because you were in front when you got there first.
You forgot the part where they pull out their sniper rifle and take out all the other runners so that they can't reach the finish line either.
As a result of Virginia's anti-spam law (which, I might note, AOL lobbied for), forging spam is a crime in Virginia. This affects any mail that is sent or received in VA, or passes through a server in VA.
Considering that AOL's servers are located in VA, all email to AOL is received in Virginia. This is part of the reason that AOL wanted the anti-spam law, so they could go after spammers like this one and slap them with nice hefty lawsuits.
The particular section of the bill (18.2-152.4) reads:
A. It shall be unlawful for any person to use a computer or computer network without authority and with the intent to:
...
7. Falsify or forge electronic mail transmission information or other routing information in any manner in connection with the transmission of unsolicited bulk electronic mail through or into the computer network of an electronic mail service provider or its subscribers.
...
C. Any person who violates this section shall be guilty of computer trespass, which offense shall be punishable as a Class 3 misdemeanor. If there is damage to the property of another valued at $2,500 or more caused by such person's reckless disregard for the consequences of his act in violation of this section, the offense shall be punished as a Class 1 misdemeanor. If there is damage to the property of another valued at $2,500 or more caused by such person's malicious act in violation of this section, the offense shall be punishable as a Class 6 felony.
You'd think that you guys would at least know how Lojak and GPS work.
First, Lojak does not use GPS. The Lojak device remains passive once its installed. The device has to be activated by a signal (transmitted via satellite) from Lojak's control center, and they won't do that without a police report being generated. Once the device is active, it emits a tracking signal which the police can use to find the car.
Second, GPS. GPS is a system by which you receive signals from a number of satellites with a timing signal. By knowing the locations of the satellites and the offsets of the timing signals, you can figure out where you are. The requires LINE OF SIGHT to the satellites. Too many buildings or too much heavy foliage, and GPS is useless.
So GPS would be useless in a laptop like this. One, you'd have to have an antenna on the outside of the case. Sure, you could blend that in the with case, but that's the least of your problems. Keep the laptop under cover, or in a box, and the GPS unit can't determine where it is at all. Plus, GPS has a built in error (for civillian purposes) of anywhere from 50 to a thousand feet (IIRC), depending on what mood the military is in that day.
OK, so Lojak. Lojak relies on the receipt of a signal from the satellites. Keep the Lojak device in a suitably shielded area, and it will never receive that signal, and even if it did, the transmitted signal would never breach your shielded perimeter. Now it's not a trivial matter to get a car shielded like that. However, a lead-lined laptop bag should work nicely.
Not that I don't agree that a tracking system for laptops would be a great idea. Actually, something that could be used in any sort of small electronic device would be good to have.
Breaking up Microsoft is a good step. Frankly, it's one of the only ones that could be taken. However, It's not going to be enough. Instead of one big company holding 80% of the OS market and 80% of the desktop suite market, you'll have 2 smaller companies, one holding the OS market and one holding the app market. It's not much progress.
At the same time Microsoft is broken up, the court should open the source code. Perhaps a new open source license would have to be devised for this, but it wouldn't be that difficult to come up with. By doing this, the court will cause competition to return to the market.
Let's all get over our irrational thoughs of "Windows is evil!" It's not evil. It just performs poorly. Windows is not a bad OS, what's bad is that it's monopolized by one company. By opening the source, other people can work on making it better, less bloated, and more cooperative with other apps. And the code line will fork and be sold by different companies. It would also provide a huge jump to windows emulators.
And what about the poor broken up Microsoft, which is now left with a pile of code that they have to share with everyone? Well, they keep claiming that they're innovators, that they drive technology. If that's the case, I'm sure they'll come up with something new pretty quickly. If not, and they were just lying to everyone, they'll dissapear. And of course, they could still provide a paid support structure for Windows and Office for those people that really like that security.
Haven't tried it under Linux yet (my Linux box is at another location right now, and since I'm using PSP to clean up the pictures when needed, it's easier to pull them onto my Windoze box). However, I'd be surprised if the DC290 didn't work with something that worked with the 280. And really surprised if it was more difficult than a couple lines of code to make it work if it didn't. The protocol used isn't that dissimilar.
Slashdot Mirror
It probably isn't as bad as you suggest. You shouldn't be seeing 30 to 40 connections to pages with modern (or at least future) browsers and servers. After getting the HTML, the popular browsers usually open up 4 to 7 concurrent connections which incur the round trip times in parallel and then reuse them for subsequent requests when possible.
.5 seconds for a round trip). Then, best case scenario, you send a request and get a response for another 1 second of latency, plus any latency present between the satellite headend and the website. Let's assume 40 objects on the page. So each connection has to get 10 objects in parallel with the other connections. So that's 1.25 seconds to set up the connection, and 1 second per image. That's 11.25 seconds of latency per page added by the satellite connection. Theoretically, if you send all the requests at the beginning of the connection, you can reduce that latency. However you still have a minimum added latency of 2.25 seconds, and it's questionable whether or not you can do that with current browsers (I personally don't know).
I'm sorry, perhaps I wasn't clear when I said that I installed and used this setup. The particular site we were using was washingtonpost.com, which at the time averaged 50 objects per page. It wasn't the worst site out there (ICQ was much worse), but it definitely wasn't the smallest pagesize.
Even if you have 4 simultaneous connections and reuse them, you're still incurring large delays. To set up the TCP connection, you need a three way handshake. That is a minimum of 1.25 seconds (given
In contrast, if you open up a dialup connection to an ISP without caching or compression and pull washingtonpost.com's front page, it will take about 11 seconds to download and render the page. That number is based on a series of tests that I performed personally, using several different computers to make sure the number was accurate.
Also, if you're wondering where I got a half second for a round trip from, it's fairly simple. The satellite is located 22,500 miles above the equator. Given a best-case scenario with both you and the satellite headend on the equator, that's a one way trip from you to the headend of 45k miles, and a RT of 90k miles. The speed of light is 186,300 miles per second. So that gives a best-case latency of about a half a second.
-Todd
---
It's just that it's not that commonly used. I installed a bidirectional, mobile satellite internet link 2 years ago, with T-1 speeds. Granted, not the cheapest thing to do, but it was still there. And it sucked, at least for web surfing, which was why we installed it. Unfortunately, we didn't have much of a choice since we needed a mobile solution, and Ricochet wasn't up to speed yet.
Typically, satellite data streams have about a half second latency. That means you send out a ping to your next hop, and it's at least 500ms before you get the response. Now when you're doing a stream of data in, this isn't so bad. You have a half second latency when you're setting up the connection, but then you have a nice even data delivery. However, for things like web surfing where you're setting up lots of connections (up to 30 or 40 per page sometimes), it's unbearable.
Satellite internet connections are useful if you're in a remote area and can't get anything else. But if you have anything else, even IDSL, you're going to find it a better choice for things like web surfing and gaming.
-Todd
---
AOL uses some location specific dial pools. So quite a lot of the AOL users can actually be traced to a region.
Well, yes and no. I can't go into too much detail about the architecture, but any give "pool" of dialup IP addresses at AOL could be used by many dialup locations. The assignments of users to IP addresses are mostly done by round robin, not by location, since all the dialup connections are backhauled to AOL's datacenters.
The closest you could nail down an AOL dialup IP is to the datacenter. To get any geographic information on a user, you'd need to have access to AOL's internal databases, and they won't even give that to partners.
-Todd
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And you must be all of 10.
What effort? Actually remembering it was posted before and then plugging "poetictech" into the search box at the bottom of the page to get the link to the earlier post?
Welcome to the networked world, buddy. It's not like I went to the library to pull up the newspaper archives on microfiche and scan through them until I found the article.
-Todd
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And you read my fscking comment before you start bitching. Taco mentions that it was posted a couple years ago. One of those /. articles that I linked is about 7 months old, and the other is less than 2. And I looked at the site on both occassions, and it was the same design.
Now granted, I can't even get to the poetictech site to see if it's a "new" design, but I doubt it. Somehow I think it's the same one we saw before.
-Todd
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Slashdot is so timely, and it never repeats itself. It's just the bestest news source ever.
/. editors should do a little more due diligence before posting a story? The rate of repitition lately is staggering.
Hey, check out these links on PoeticTech's workstation too!
Anti-cubicle
Ultimate Workstation
Hey wait... those links look oddly familiar.
Perhaps the
-Todd
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OK, so it's illegal to mirror and link DeCSS?
No problem. Let's all mirror and link DeCSS.
After a little searching, I found a site that has developed a nice smokescreen. It's a program, called DeCSS, which removes Cascading Style Sheets from HTML pages. Comes complete with a mirror and linking kit. Nothing illegal about that.
Check out my site for a DeCSS mirror and instructions.
-Todd
---
Sure, it's easy enough for a company to interview for a specific skill set without getting into anything of their business. But that's only half of an interview. In any good interview, you are interviewing the company, as well as them interviewing you. And if this is a startup that feels they have some secrets that they don't want getting out until they're ready to announce it, then why shouldn't they have an NDA for you to sign?
I recently took a new position with a startup in Cambridge. When I was interviewing, I had to sign an NDA (really basic document, not full of legalease. Basically just a paragraph that says "please don't tell anyone else about this stuff. There's not much we can do if you choose to, but please don't do it."). I saw nothing wrong with this, since their whole business is based around a system the developed that noone has anything like yet, and they're not ready to announce to the general public.
Sure, go ahead and refuse the NDA. They can either not hire you, or go through the interview without telling you anything. But don't you *want* to know something about the company you're wanting to work for?
-Todd
---
Personally, I'd just ignore this little change, like many people ignore the "don't run servers" rule. Why? @Home doesn't care.
How do I know this? Well, I was at a conference in DC last spring called Spam Summit. Basically, everyone involved with blocking spam, or opt-in (real opt-in, like MyPoints) advertising systems got together and talked about the technology. @Home did a big presentation on anti-spam things which happened to include some talking about their policies on people running servers.
The fact of the matter is that @Home just doesn't enforce the policy. The exec from @Home giving the presentation said very clearly that they don't routinely check for servers (excepting NNTP proxies, since they had that little problem with the UDP this past winter), and they really don't care if people run them as long as they are not causing problems. He defined problems as taking up too much bandwidth, or causing a security problem for @Home itself.
So I really don't think this is a cause for concern. I doubt they're gonna bother checking for these things (they'd have to sniff the network constantly... VPNs operate on arbitrary ports, and it's not like they can check for a server, since @Home users are gonna be VPN clients (for the most part).
-Todd
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Linux would be a nice change. I'm sure it would have less problems than Windows. However, I also wish they'd skip increasing the FSB speed, and work on the multiplier.
It's a well known fact of overclocking that increasing the FSB is a much less reliable method than increasing the multiplier. Why? Well, when you increase the FSB, you're driving all the devices in the system faster, and at non-standard clock rates as well. You stand a good chance of having the IDE or video controller stop the system. When you increase the multiplier, you're only touching the CPU.
He might have been able to get that Celeron up to 650 or possibly higher if he left the FSB alone and cranked the multiplier.
-Todd (running a Celeron 300a at 566 with a combination of multiplier and FSB increases, and air cooling only)
---
Since I just left AOL recently, I can say with some authority that this is not a fraud. I've actually looked at manda.office.aol.com when I was working there, and I've played with some of the Tokyo project software.
.jpg tells us nothing of the validity. So they took a screen shot? Whos to say they didn't compose that website, loaded it and then typed "http://manda.office.aol.com" in the Location bar and just didn't press return?
1) First, being, that www.inside-aol.com is obviously not an official or trust-worthy source of information.
2) I may be thinking of a different website but I believe that www.inside-aol.com has done hoaxes before.
True, however that doesn't mean it's immediately wrong.
3) The
Absolutely. However, in this case that site does actually exist. It's internal to AOL, and not accessible outside. Likely they have an inside contact that sent them the screenshot. I don't believe you can access the office.aol.com network from the PCs in the lobby of the Reston and Dulles AOL offices.
4) Theres something of an informal nature about this website that reeks of hoax, its written in such a manner to imply something informal (read: "The Long awaited.. etc.. blah blah") yet it contains a dubious confidentiality clause at the begining ("Do not distribute or show..."). I dont think that "Do not show..." is common legalese.
Yes, it is a semi-informal site. It's an internal site, for AOL employees. This is not a site that was designed to be used by anyone outside the company, and the people who put it up are not web designers. The "confidentiality clause" at the top is not legalese. It's a reminder. Everyone who has access to view office.aol.com websites has already signed either NDAs (in the case of on-site vendors), or employment agreements that contain much stronger language.
Anyways, you can believe me if you want. I've seen that web site first hand, and can tell you that it's real.
-Todd
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I can accept the point that aol is perhaps easy to use but then WHY OH WHY couple it with linux. Whilst I love linux it really was a complete bugger to install and I still keep it for my server and run Win2k on my workstation.
Why? Well, let's just think about this. AOL wants to develop a bunch of "AOL Appliances". Things like the I-Opener (but I'm sure locked down better). Why the heck would they want to do this with a windows platform? Then they have to pay a license fee for windows for each and every device.
Why not just port the client to Linux, and put Linux on these appliances? No license fees for the OS, and the interface, to the user, is pretty much the same. That's what they've done.
I saw the Netscape plugin portion of the Tokyo project work when I was still working at AOL. This was probably about 6 months ago that I first looked at it, and it was pretty slick then. Had a few bugs, but it was good for an alpha. I never did get to Gamera, even though I heard a lot about it. Mostly because I never took the time to download it off the internal servers.
IIRC, AOL was moving towards using Gecko in the clients (and therefore Netscape/Mozilla) instead of IE. Most of the holdups were concerns over the agreements with MS that keep AOL on the desktop of fresh Windows installs. However, I seem to remember that as I was leaving, they sorted it out and were pushing ahead. Although, it was always discussed as making an interface to plug a third-party browser into AOL, and never about Netscape/Gecko specifically. But I didn't live in that part of the AOL house, so I could be mistaken.
-Todd
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Ah. I didn't realize that he was actually squatting. From the article on Slashdot, it sounded like he was using it for legitimate purposes.
I didn't read the link behind that one because it sounded like yet another case where the little guy got stepped on.
And as far as "It's a step in the right direction for WIPO" goes, sure... I agree with that. However, given WIPO's track record, I think it's gonna take a lot more than one case before we could truly say that they changed their tune.
-Todd
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Wow, how fickle Slashdot it. So now, because of one instance of standing up for the little guy, we say yay for WIPO?
Wasn't it just last week that they evicted corinthians.com ?
-Todd
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If the data supports the claims that have been made over the years about cell phone radiation causing increased risk of cancer--and I'm not saying it *does* in fact do so, just that many people have claimed it--then the question will become how long have they known and have they been hiding it.
Well, I can't speak authoritatively on this, of course, but I used to work at the George Washington University Medical Center's Animal Research Lab (and before anyone jumps on my case, it was a very humane lab, and it was a work study position. I don't want to hear it.) doing administrative computer stuff that included a bit of data entry for a study on the effects of cell phone radiation on mice. IIRC, this was one of the larger such stdies, and it was a multi-year project.
Since I was working there in '95 and '96, that probably would have put the project completion around '98. Give another year for chewing on the data, internal meetings and such, and you'll prolly find that they only really completed things last year. However, I also remember that the study results, to that point, were mostly inconclusive. There really wasn't a higher incidence of tumors, malignant or otherwise, in the test groups as compared to the control groups.
-Todd
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I would suggest trying your local Goodwill. You probably know them better for having a store where you can buy donated stuff cheap. But, at least in my area, they also have classes in a variety of topics, including computers. If you feel up to it, you can always teach one of these.
And not only that, but you can donate your time in the Goodwill (or other charity) office helping with administrative computer stuff. When I was in college, during the summer when I didn't have classes, I used to work an 8 hour day on Wednesdays for nothing at Goodwill working on their administrative systems. Everything from PC support, to new installs, to supporting their database stuff. Chances are any charity in the area would love to have someone come in and help them out with this stuff for free (since most of the other people in the administrative office are paid).
-Todd
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Okay, now this would suck. You'd have to really like decorating in red :) Give the technology a few more years though to settle itself, and maybe this will be a reality.
This is my hope as well. Blue has pretty much always been a difficult color for LEDs and the like. And the fact that they can do something like this in blue at all is a big advancement. So hopefully we'll see some rapid development on the lifetime of the blue LEPs.
-Todd
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Um, Yes.
/. article, not the linked article), the poster thought that the concept of "electronic paper", so to speak, was the new technology. It is not. I provided links to stories about this technology. Yes, there are different implementations. Yes, the colors are a new thing. Yes, applying the polymer with an inkjet-like technology is neat. But that's beside the point.
/. article differently, yay for you. Just goes to show how interpretation makes a difference.
The way I read the article (the
Now, if you read the
Next time, you might want to be a little more tactful. You might be taken more seriously.
-Todd
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OK, so the display's only good for 1000 hours. I don't know about the rest of the world, but I keep my cell phone turned on 24 hours a day. So, if I do the math...
1000 hours / 24 hours per day = 41 1/3 days.
So it looks like I'll have to replace my cell phone every month and a half if it uses one of these displays. Doesn't seem that useful to me. Maybe they could have a red "screen saver" mode that would just use the red display elements unless you needed full color. That would at least give it a little better lifetime, since then their assumption that a cell phone is only "in use" 200 hours a year would be a little more valid.
However, I still think that a display that is only good for 1000 hours of use is probably not going to be that widely used at all. I mean, sure, the rest of the crowd here is talking about a lot of neat things:
paper thin TVs - How many hours of TV do *you* watch a day? More than 3? Then this display is dead in less than a year.
digital wallpaper - Do you really want to re-wallpaper your house every month and a half?
If the technology is cheap enough, then sure, it can be used for things like an electronic newspaper. I would really like to see that, actually. I'd pay $100 a year (assuming non-continuous usage here) for a thin, flexible display that gave me up to the minute news. Of course, you still need something to drive the display, and then you might be getting into something bulky. But the ideas are there. I just think that someone needs to worry about the 1000 hour lifetime of this technology, rather than just dismissing it.
-Todd
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Nothing new about this. Oooh, it's color. I bet that's just a *huge* accomplishment. Develop the technology in black, then change it to RGB and overlay them.
If I remember correctly, some researchers at MIT developed "digital ink" at least a couple years ago. Basically, a flexible thin display that you controlled in a similar fashion to an LCD screen.
Hey look, here's a link to a story on ScienceNews about it.
And look, it's the research papers from the IBM guys working on it!
Wow, and here's a Company that's developing electronic ink
Guess it's not such a new idea after all.
-Todd
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It is amazing how M$ take some half decent ideas and botch them up. It is almost like running the 100m dash, but stopping at the 80m mark, because you were in front when you got there first.
You forgot the part where they pull out their sniper rifle and take out all the other runners so that they can't reach the finish line either.
-Todd
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Considering that AOL's servers are located in VA, all email to AOL is received in Virginia. This is part of the reason that AOL wanted the anti-spam law, so they could go after spammers like this one and slap them with nice hefty lawsuits.
The particular section of the bill (18.2-152.4) reads:
Virginia - SB 881 Computer Crimes Act; electronic mail
Original Slashdot Story - Virgina Criminalizes spam, ACLU against it
-Todd
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You'd think that you guys would at least know how Lojak and GPS work.
First, Lojak does not use GPS. The Lojak device remains passive once its installed. The device has to be activated by a signal (transmitted via satellite) from Lojak's control center, and they won't do that without a police report being generated. Once the device is active, it emits a tracking signal which the police can use to find the car.
Second, GPS. GPS is a system by which you receive signals from a number of satellites with a timing signal. By knowing the locations of the satellites and the offsets of the timing signals, you can figure out where you are. The requires LINE OF SIGHT to the satellites. Too many buildings or too much heavy foliage, and GPS is useless.
So GPS would be useless in a laptop like this. One, you'd have to have an antenna on the outside of the case. Sure, you could blend that in the with case, but that's the least of your problems. Keep the laptop under cover, or in a box, and the GPS unit can't determine where it is at all. Plus, GPS has a built in error (for civillian purposes) of anywhere from 50 to a thousand feet (IIRC), depending on what mood the military is in that day.
OK, so Lojak. Lojak relies on the receipt of a signal from the satellites. Keep the Lojak device in a suitably shielded area, and it will never receive that signal, and even if it did, the transmitted signal would never breach your shielded perimeter. Now it's not a trivial matter to get a car shielded like that. However, a lead-lined laptop bag should work nicely.
Not that I don't agree that a tracking system for laptops would be a great idea. Actually, something that could be used in any sort of small electronic device would be good to have.
-Todd
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Breaking up Microsoft is a good step. Frankly, it's one of the only ones that could be taken. However, It's not going to be enough. Instead of one big company holding 80% of the OS market and 80% of the desktop suite market, you'll have 2 smaller companies, one holding the OS market and one holding the app market. It's not much progress.
At the same time Microsoft is broken up, the court should open the source code. Perhaps a new open source license would have to be devised for this, but it wouldn't be that difficult to come up with. By doing this, the court will cause competition to return to the market.
Let's all get over our irrational thoughs of "Windows is evil!" It's not evil. It just performs poorly. Windows is not a bad OS, what's bad is that it's monopolized by one company. By opening the source, other people can work on making it better, less bloated, and more cooperative with other apps. And the code line will fork and be sold by different companies. It would also provide a huge jump to windows emulators.
And what about the poor broken up Microsoft, which is now left with a pile of code that they have to share with everyone? Well, they keep claiming that they're innovators, that they drive technology. If that's the case, I'm sure they'll come up with something new pretty quickly. If not, and they were just lying to everyone, they'll dissapear. And of course, they could still provide a paid support structure for Windows and Office for those people that really like that security.
-Todd
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Haven't tried it under Linux yet (my Linux box is at another location right now, and since I'm using PSP to clean up the pictures when needed, it's easier to pull them onto my Windoze box). However, I'd be surprised if the DC290 didn't work with something that worked with the 280. And really surprised if it was more difficult than a couple lines of code to make it work if it didn't. The protocol used isn't that dissimilar.
-Todd
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