http://www.skype.com/products/explained.html "A true P2P system, in our opinion, is one where all nodes in a network join together dynamically to participate in traffic routing-, processing- and bandwidth intensive tasks that would otherwise be handled by central servers."
Of course your traffic isn't passing through Skype's servers. It doesn't need to. It's passing through everyone elses machine thats using Skype.
With vonage your traffic goes through only one other party while with Skype it passes through everyone.
If you want true point to point communications that doesn't pass through anyone's pc's but your ISP and the hops in between then just use NetMeeting that's built into Windows.
The WRT54G is no longer open as of version 5. They shrunk the memory storage on it. They took the WRT54G version 4 and did a usual upgrade on it and renamed it the WRT54GL. The WRT53G is a new router in the old model number, even though it says version 5 on it. The G doesn't have room for you to load your own code, though the GL does.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WRT54G About the WRT54G v.5: BCM5352EKPB Chipset - Switched to VxWorks OS and reduced Flash Memory and RAM; not compatible with most 3rd party firmware
About the WRT54GL v.1: New model line, released after the version 5 WRT54G, which returns to a Linux-based internal OS as opposed to the v5's VxWorks firmware. NOT SpeedBooster enabled in stock state. Essentially the same as the WRT54G version 4.0, but with a new model number.
This reminds me of irc in the old days. If you changed your nick to "com1" and sent someone a message, when they messaged you back their pc locked up. Supposedly their pc would try and send data to their com1 port and screw things up. There used to be lots of fun things you could do on irc to be mean to people. Of course, telling people that alt-f4 gives ops still works sometimes too.
I use a Fortigate firewall and they are amazing. I can't recommend them enough. The antivirus running on the servers and clients is almost redundant and it only catches spyware and adware. Viruses never make it through the Fortigate. http://www.fortinet.com/
I bet you recycle your own poop too, huh? All those "alternative" energy sources sound nice and I'm sure they give you the warm fuzzies at night but they are useless for generating the massive amounts of electricity we need. They're good if you want to power your home, but the amount of land and money you'd need to power a large city makes them unfeasable. This is why we don't use them now in case you didn't notice. Hybrid cars can't even get much better milage than regular gas cars and their increased cost actually makes the vehicle more expensive in the long run because you're really not saving much gas. This is the world as we know it. We don't have any choice other than to use what we know can produce massive amounts of electricity. I lived in Tehachapi, CA for a while where there is a massive wind farm. It produced enough power for a small part of LA and that was it. It covers mile after mile of extremely windy mountain passes. What makes you think wind power is any kind of solution? The 15,000 windmills in Calif produce 800 million kilowatt-hours of power which is 1% of the state's needs. Please tell me where we're going to put enough windmills to supply even 25% of one state? We need nuke plants and we need them now. There are no alternatives. There are no other sources that we can use. That's reality.
I'll pay $40 for a REALLY good game. The rest have to wait till they approach $30. If I see anything above $45 then it gets to sit on the shelf and there's no way in hell I'll touch it no matter how good it is. It's going to get cheaper in time anyway so there's no point in rushing. A few months of not playing a game will not kill me. It's rediculous that some games refuse to go below $50 even months after it's been out.
You probably already use plug strips that have a switch on them. While it may be inconvenient to plug/unplug them on a regular basis, it's rather easy to hit the power switch. Just get 2 or 3 strips and categorize the plugs. One for things that have to stay on (answering machine), one for things that are only on while home or only when awake (router, dsl modem, cordless phone), etc. When you leave home, hit the switch. When you go to bed, hit another switch. When you're getting busy in the bedroom...oh wait this is slashdot nm.
Okay explain something to me. How is Google using their lines? Someone hops on their pc and connects to the web and opens a page served by a google server. The server sends pages to the user. This sounds like the user using the lines, not google. Google doesn't just sit there and send data to random ip's over Verizon's lines. The user is paying verizon for the use of their lines, whether they go to google or yahoo or wherever. How does Verizon figure that google is using their lines?
Way to create a major fire hazard. The blankets made specifically for hot water heaters are made to not burn, since a hot water heater does this thing where it gets, you know, hot. You might save a few bucks on a blanket but how much does replacing everything after a fire cost?
The author missed so much about these services that I'm betting he was paid to push one over the other. There is one massive difference between the two that has been overlooked. When you put an artist into Last.fm, you get a list of bands. Okay. Good enough. Look at the bands. I typed in "Garbage" and all the bands at the top were bands who's songs have been overplayed on radio for a while, meaning I already know who they are. Thanks anyway.
#18 was the first band I hadn't heard of. I checked them out and didn't like them so I moved on. #30 was next and by them I'm already down to only a 50% match. So tell me how does a service help if the only recommendations it has are bands I already know I like or don't like? How does this help if the only bands on it that I've never heard of are matched below 50%
Putting "Garbage" into Pandora and I got a band I'd never heard of on the 3rd song. Put in Garbage again and totally different songs come up. Type in Garbage again Last.fm and what do you get? The exact same list.
I decided to try a totally different band. I typed in Wumpscut. Here again, I already know all these bands and the first band I haven't heard is way down at 53% again. This doesn't help me because down there the bands sound totally different than the one I typed in.
So what's the point in telling me other bands I might like if I've already over-heard those bands and already know whether or not I like them? Why give me the exact same list every time? I did't like the first one I want another. Pandora creates a true mix and exposes far more unknown music than Last.fm does.
I used the term "mp3" because it has been the most popular song format for a long time, hence it would be a term most searched for. I don't hear people say "Hey, how many AAC's you got?" I hear "How many mp3's you got?"
Second, name a product Apple has managed to have dominant sales in for any length of time. Every single time they come out with a product that's pretty good and popular, they manage to lose dominance in a short amount of time. They're much better at selling to the minority than to the majority and I seriously doubt the iPod will be any different. There's a couple decades of history that speaks volumes about that.
Since Google are the kings of search, they know exactly how much demand there is for EVERYTHING. They can sift through their data and see what markets have a huge demand and then dominate them. I wouldn't be surprised if in a few years Google entered new markets that had nothing to do with technology and surprised everyone with massive sales, all because they can read the minds of millions of people and know what they need and want in a way that no marketing company could ever even dream of. You can bet that any market they enter will be one with a much larger demand than supply, since they are the easiest to be profitable with. I wonder how many times a day "mp3" is entered into a google search bar.
Everyone has $1 bills. There are no people lacking money so badly that they do not handle $1 bills regularly. I've met a number of homeless people that make more money than I do just from panhandling. Internet access is everywhere too. There really are very few people who can't get online if they want to either from a net cafe, a friend, or a library.
Oooh good point. Maybe Google will start charging the telcos to use all the fiber they just sold to them? lol We went from modems to 1mbit broadband very quickly. I think all that dark fiber will be necessary in just a few years.
What kind of idiot thinks connection type has anything to do with infectability? A virus doesn't give a crap if it's traveling over fiber, dsl, cable, or phone lines. With broadband you can get 10 or 15 spyware programs and viruses and not see much of a dent in your overall speed. With dialup, just one or two infections will bring you down completely. If anything you'll be more likely to get infected since dialers can't affect broadband, only dialup. A nice $2,000 phone bill should be enough to convince anyone that dialup is not safer. Maybe he thinks using dialup will protect him from cookies too.
You should really read decisions for yourself before believing the lies the Christian right tells you about them.
The judge's decision had nothing to do with the comptetency of the defense legal team and everything to do with the evil acts of the school board, from using threats to coerce other members of the board, creating rifts in the community, and lying their asses off. The board went above and beyond to show the community that it's motives for pushing ID were religious, and many were documented.
ID was rejected for not being science because it is assumption based, again by no fault of the defense team. ID requires an assumption to exist so it cannot be science. There is not one single piece of evidence that points to a creator, only a lack of knowledge which we are filling in with actual science as time goes by.
Please be careful who's drivel you listen to. The school board even admitted they didn't understand ID at all and admitted they didn't bother learning what it was. They believed lies told by the Christian right in it's efforts to destroy science and inject religion into public schools.
"I'm unconvinced- I think webmail will soon be replacing client side readers for all but power users."
There are businesses that rely critically on email and to put something that critical over the internet does not always make sense. If you lose internet for whatever reason, business stops. If email is hosted in-house then it doesn't and the company has total control over running and maintaining it. If it goes down then the company can fix it instead of having to wait for some other company to fix the internet connection. I'm all for web based applications but until the internet becomes just as reliable as an in-house network I can't see it happening for critical applications. I can see myself at home using gword to write documents and gsheet to whip up a quick budget, but it's uses are not unlimited.
Oh no! A power outage! Good thing we have those generators so we can...oh crap all our apps are web based and there's no internet!
The following numbers are guaranteed to be at least somewhat inaccurate.
Number of Linux Server licenses sold: 451,236 Number of Windows Server licenses sold: 982,435 Number of Linux servers running because it only takes half a brain to realize that you can download everything you need for free: 45,345,813,834
Forget about Skype ever being secure. It already has an encryption layer but since they've made "arrangements" with law enforcement, it cannot be assumed to give you total privacy.
If you want truly secure VOIP, follow Shtoom's progress. It's as close as it gets right now.
This is not meant to be a flame, but a simple observation. As a windows user, I've noticed that every so often a story comes up that attempts to justify the importance of a particular flavor of *nix. Are different flavors in danger of dissapearing into irrelevance overnight if stories are not done on why they are still valid? I use windows because that's what my employer has on the network and there is no room for nix. At home I've used FreeBSD, Slack, and Mandrake. For the desktop I don't really see much difference. They all do pretty much the same thing. I can surf the web, write my emails, and chat to my friends on Yahoo. Why is it then that we must continually justify the existance of one flavor or another? Is there some piece of Slack that I missed that makes it a n00b flavor or something? I'm just not really understanding I guess.
At work I maintain about 30 computers and many of them are different configurations. I make a 4 gig partition and when I'm done installing windows, updates, and the base apps we need I put an image in that partition. Restoring each pc is easy and I don't have to keep digging up all the different drivers I need. It's especially useful since different people use different apps.
Speakers, whether powered or not, have an impedance that must be watched if you're going to hook up more than two to each channel. Put two 8 ohm speakers in series you get 16 ohms of impedance. This won't fry your sound card but the volume in the speakers will be lower. Put two 8 ohm speakers in parallel and your impedance becomes 4 ohms. Volume stays the same but you risk burning your soundcard. Put 6 speakers in parallel and you start a fire. The best thing to do is put 4 speakers in series/parallel. Split the channel into two lines and put two speakers in series on each line. This keeps the impedance at 8 ohms and gives you 4 speakers.
Of course, the suggestion below to just buy an FM transmitter is the best one yet. You can buy tiny FM radios to plug into powered speakers if you really want the powered speakers, or just use boom boxes instead.
Slashdot Mirror
http://www.skype.com/products/explained.html
"A true P2P system, in our opinion, is one where all nodes in a network join together dynamically to participate in traffic routing-, processing- and bandwidth intensive tasks that would otherwise be handled by central servers."
Of course your traffic isn't passing through Skype's servers. It doesn't need to. It's passing through everyone elses machine thats using Skype.
With vonage your traffic goes through only one other party while with Skype it passes through everyone.
If you want true point to point communications that doesn't pass through anyone's pc's but your ISP and the hops in between then just use NetMeeting that's built into Windows.
The WRT54G is no longer open as of version 5. They shrunk the memory storage on it.
They took the WRT54G version 4 and did a usual upgrade on it and renamed it the WRT54GL. The WRT53G is a new router in the old model number, even though it says version 5 on it.
The G doesn't have room for you to load your own code, though the GL does.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WRT54G
About the WRT54G v.5:
BCM5352EKPB Chipset - Switched to VxWorks OS and reduced Flash Memory and RAM; not compatible with most 3rd party firmware
About the WRT54GL v.1:
New model line, released after the version 5 WRT54G, which returns to a Linux-based internal OS as opposed to the v5's VxWorks firmware. NOT SpeedBooster enabled in stock state. Essentially the same as the WRT54G version 4.0, but with a new model number.
This reminds me of irc in the old days. If you changed your nick to "com1" and sent someone a message, when they messaged you back their pc locked up. Supposedly their pc would try and send data to their com1 port and screw things up.
There used to be lots of fun things you could do on irc to be mean to people. Of course, telling people that alt-f4 gives ops still works sometimes too.
I use a Fortigate firewall and they are amazing. I can't recommend them enough. The antivirus running on the servers and clients is almost redundant and it only catches spyware and adware. Viruses never make it through the Fortigate.
http://www.fortinet.com/
I bet you recycle your own poop too, huh? All those "alternative" energy sources sound nice and I'm sure they give you the warm fuzzies at night but they are useless for generating the massive amounts of electricity we need. They're good if you want to power your home, but the amount of land and money you'd need to power a large city makes them unfeasable. This is why we don't use them now in case you didn't notice.
Hybrid cars can't even get much better milage than regular gas cars and their increased cost actually makes the vehicle more expensive in the long run because you're really not saving much gas.
This is the world as we know it. We don't have any choice other than to use what we know can produce massive amounts of electricity.
I lived in Tehachapi, CA for a while where there is a massive wind farm. It produced enough power for a small part of LA and that was it. It covers mile after mile of extremely windy mountain passes. What makes you think wind power is any kind of solution? The 15,000 windmills in Calif produce 800 million kilowatt-hours of power which is 1% of the state's needs. Please tell me where we're going to put enough windmills to supply even 25% of one state?
We need nuke plants and we need them now. There are no alternatives. There are no other sources that we can use. That's reality.
I'll pay $40 for a REALLY good game. The rest have to wait till they approach $30. If I see anything above $45 then it gets to sit on the shelf and there's no way in hell I'll touch it no matter how good it is. It's going to get cheaper in time anyway so there's no point in rushing. A few months of not playing a game will not kill me. It's rediculous that some games refuse to go below $50 even months after it's been out.
You probably already use plug strips that have a switch on them. While it may be inconvenient to plug/unplug them on a regular basis, it's rather easy to hit the power switch. Just get 2 or 3 strips and categorize the plugs. One for things that have to stay on (answering machine), one for things that are only on while home or only when awake (router, dsl modem, cordless phone), etc.
When you leave home, hit the switch. When you go to bed, hit another switch. When you're getting busy in the bedroom...oh wait this is slashdot nm.
Okay explain something to me. How is Google using their lines? Someone hops on their pc and connects to the web and opens a page served by a google server. The server sends pages to the user. This sounds like the user using the lines, not google. Google doesn't just sit there and send data to random ip's over Verizon's lines. The user is paying verizon for the use of their lines, whether they go to google or yahoo or wherever. How does Verizon figure that google is using their lines?
Way to create a major fire hazard. The blankets made specifically for hot water heaters are made to not burn, since a hot water heater does this thing where it gets, you know, hot. You might save a few bucks on a blanket but how much does replacing everything after a fire cost?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Edwards_Demin g
He was the one that brought us Statistical process control (SPC) and yes it was just over 50 years ago.
The author missed so much about these services that I'm betting he was paid to push one over the other.
There is one massive difference between the two that has been overlooked. When you put an artist into Last.fm, you get a list of bands. Okay. Good enough. Look at the bands. I typed in "Garbage" and all the bands at the top were bands who's songs have been overplayed on radio for a while, meaning I already know who they are. Thanks anyway.
#18 was the first band I hadn't heard of. I checked them out and didn't like them so I moved on. #30 was next and by them I'm already down to only a 50% match. So tell me how does a service help if the only recommendations it has are bands I already know I like or don't like? How does this help if the only bands on it that I've never heard of are matched below 50%
Putting "Garbage" into Pandora and I got a band I'd never heard of on the 3rd song. Put in Garbage again and totally different songs come up. Type in Garbage again Last.fm and what do you get? The exact same list.
I decided to try a totally different band. I typed in Wumpscut. Here again, I already know all these bands and the first band I haven't heard is way down at 53% again. This doesn't help me because down there the bands sound totally different than the one I typed in.
So what's the point in telling me other bands I might like if I've already over-heard those bands and already know whether or not I like them? Why give me the exact same list every time? I did't like the first one I want another. Pandora creates a true mix and exposes far more unknown music than Last.fm does.
Do they also check for tv tuner cards in your pc?
I used the term "mp3" because it has been the most popular song format for a long time, hence it would be a term most searched for. I don't hear people say "Hey, how many AAC's you got?" I hear "How many mp3's you got?"
Second, name a product Apple has managed to have dominant sales in for any length of time. Every single time they come out with a product that's pretty good and popular, they manage to lose dominance in a short amount of time. They're much better at selling to the minority than to the majority and I seriously doubt the iPod will be any different. There's a couple decades of history that speaks volumes about that.
Since Google are the kings of search, they know exactly how much demand there is for EVERYTHING. They can sift through their data and see what markets have a huge demand and then dominate them. I wouldn't be surprised if in a few years Google entered new markets that had nothing to do with technology and surprised everyone with massive sales, all because they can read the minds of millions of people and know what they need and want in a way that no marketing company could ever even dream of.
You can bet that any market they enter will be one with a much larger demand than supply, since they are the easiest to be profitable with. I wonder how many times a day "mp3" is entered into a google search bar.
Everyone has $1 bills. There are no people lacking money so badly that they do not handle $1 bills regularly. I've met a number of homeless people that make more money than I do just from panhandling.
Internet access is everywhere too. There really are very few people who can't get online if they want to either from a net cafe, a friend, or a library.
Oooh good point. Maybe Google will start charging the telcos to use all the fiber they just sold to them? lol
We went from modems to 1mbit broadband very quickly. I think all that dark fiber will be necessary in just a few years.
What was that story not so long ago about Google buying up dark fiber everywhere?
What kind of idiot thinks connection type has anything to do with infectability? A virus doesn't give a crap if it's traveling over fiber, dsl, cable, or phone lines. With broadband you can get 10 or 15 spyware programs and viruses and not see much of a dent in your overall speed. With dialup, just one or two infections will bring you down completely. If anything you'll be more likely to get infected since dialers can't affect broadband, only dialup. A nice $2,000 phone bill should be enough to convince anyone that dialup is not safer.
Maybe he thinks using dialup will protect him from cookies too.
You should really read decisions for yourself before believing the lies the Christian right tells you about them.
The judge's decision had nothing to do with the comptetency of the defense legal team and everything to do with the evil acts of the school board, from using threats to coerce other members of the board, creating rifts in the community, and lying their asses off. The board went above and beyond to show the community that it's motives for pushing ID were religious, and many were documented.
ID was rejected for not being science because it is assumption based, again by no fault of the defense team. ID requires an assumption to exist so it cannot be science. There is not one single piece of evidence that points to a creator, only a lack of knowledge which we are filling in with actual science as time goes by.
Please be careful who's drivel you listen to. The school board even admitted they didn't understand ID at all and admitted they didn't bother learning what it was. They believed lies told by the Christian right in it's efforts to destroy science and inject religion into public schools.
"I'm unconvinced- I think webmail will soon be replacing client side readers for all but power users."
There are businesses that rely critically on email and to put something that critical over the internet does not always make sense. If you lose internet for whatever reason, business stops. If email is hosted in-house then it doesn't and the company has total control over running and maintaining it. If it goes down then the company can fix it instead of having to wait for some other company to fix the internet connection.
I'm all for web based applications but until the internet becomes just as reliable as an in-house network I can't see it happening for critical applications. I can see myself at home using gword to write documents and gsheet to whip up a quick budget, but it's uses are not unlimited.
Oh no! A power outage! Good thing we have those generators so we can...oh crap all our apps are web based and there's no internet!
It's just a very bad idea in some cases.
The following numbers are guaranteed to be at least somewhat inaccurate.
Number of Linux Server licenses sold: 451,236
Number of Windows Server licenses sold: 982,435
Number of Linux servers running because it only takes half a brain to realize that you can download everything you need for free: 45,345,813,834
Wow, Windows DID sell more!
This site follows Skype's work with encryption.
http://www.pgpvoip.com/
Zimmerman's work with encrypting VOIP is with this client:
http://divmod.org/projects/shtoom
Forget about Skype ever being secure. It already has an encryption layer but since they've made "arrangements" with law enforcement, it cannot be assumed to give you total privacy.
If you want truly secure VOIP, follow Shtoom's progress. It's as close as it gets right now.
This is not meant to be a flame, but a simple observation. As a windows user, I've noticed that every so often a story comes up that attempts to justify the importance of a particular flavor of *nix. Are different flavors in danger of dissapearing into irrelevance overnight if stories are not done on why they are still valid?
I use windows because that's what my employer has on the network and there is no room for nix. At home I've used FreeBSD, Slack, and Mandrake. For the desktop I don't really see much difference. They all do pretty much the same thing. I can surf the web, write my emails, and chat to my friends on Yahoo. Why is it then that we must continually justify the existance of one flavor or another? Is there some piece of Slack that I missed that makes it a n00b flavor or something? I'm just not really understanding I guess.
At work I maintain about 30 computers and many of them are different configurations. I make a 4 gig partition and when I'm done installing windows, updates, and the base apps we need I put an image in that partition. Restoring each pc is easy and I don't have to keep digging up all the different drivers I need. It's especially useful since different people use different apps.
Speakers, whether powered or not, have an impedance that must be watched if you're going to hook up more than two to each channel.
Put two 8 ohm speakers in series you get 16 ohms of impedance. This won't fry your sound card but the volume in the speakers will be lower.
Put two 8 ohm speakers in parallel and your impedance becomes 4 ohms. Volume stays the same but you risk burning your soundcard.
Put 6 speakers in parallel and you start a fire.
The best thing to do is put 4 speakers in series/parallel. Split the channel into two lines and put two speakers in series on each line. This keeps the impedance at 8 ohms and gives you 4 speakers.
Of course, the suggestion below to just buy an FM transmitter is the best one yet. You can buy tiny FM radios to plug into powered speakers if you really want the powered speakers, or just use boom boxes instead.