Phone ring signal is also -90vdc, way higher than ethernet. Good ethernet cards have filters, but if you are unlucky, you could blow out the transceiver circuit in a cheap ethernet card when your phone rings.
My Myth frontend/backend with a Celeron 430 was unable to smoothly play HD MPEG2 recordings from live TV without VDPAU. It would sometimes do ok if it was a previously recorded, but I'd still get the occasional studder. I've also never been able to get any 3 of the HD digital capture cards I've tried set up and recording programs on the correct channel. So my experience with that is limited. I fell back to analog again.
Of course I should have realized VDPAU was deinterlacing. But my PVR-150 recordings frequently have jagged edges in the on screen playback. I hoped playing around with the deinterlacer would fix this, but I guess not. I wonder what could be the cause?
Any digital (ATSC or ClearQAM) tuner on the PCI slot should not take any more horsepower than writing the firewire tuner stream to disk. This is because the digital TV signal is already an encoded MPEG-2 stream that can also be sent pretty much straight to disk also.
A Hauppauge HD-PVR or PVR-x50 should also cause no problems, because they hardware encode a MPEG-2 or 4 stream and present it to your computer. Now if you have an analog tuner with software frame grabber, it will take a lot of horsepower. I am surprised the parent said he could do 1080i without VDPAU.
With VDPAU it would be cake walk for a P4 to write 4 hd streams to disk while watching one. The problem I would worry about is saturating the hard drive controller. You might need to be sure you have 2 disks on different controllers.
You are right currently, but Wave is intended long term (+5 years out) to be an email replacement, with many cool features that are currently not available, or are ugly grafts onto the email protocol. It most certainly isn't dead. I use it at least once a week. It was just released much earlier in the development cycle (like pre-alpha) than Gmail usually does with its "betas". Because of this, it is much harder to get an invitation. I only have 21 to give out, as opposed to 100 when I signed up with gmail.
I don't understand your disdain for the Gmail web enhancements. Personally I love most of them, and ignore the rest. But you can still turn almost every one of them off, and use Gmail just like it was 2001. They are even still offering the non-ajaxey html interface. Which I think is an amusing archaeology experiment.
Some new cars with electronically controlled transmissions may either try to lock you out of shifting from drive when it thinks you shouldn't. This can generally be overridden by really slamming the gear shift to neutral, breaking the locking mechanism. Or some cars now have no mechanical linkage between the shifter and transmission. In this case you flat can't do anything.
If your preferred method doesn't work, you need to be ready and willing to turn the car off rather than die in a flaming wreck. Most cars with this level of computer control probably won't lock the wheel unless the car is at a stop. Of course they shouldn't have failed in such a dangerous way either, so YMMV.
Hand brakes are usually cable operated (not hydraulic), and only operate the rear brakes. They can't apply that much force, nothing like standing on the regular brakes, and if the car is front wheel drive they have even less effectiveness because all the weight and power are on the wheels the hand brake is not connected to.
If that car was more than a couple years old, the car probably didn't have fly by wire throttle. So the o2 sensor didn't have control of anything besides fuel trim. What it did have was no good sensor diagnostic code so it could realize the o2 sensor was going bad and drop out of closed loop operation, and into open loop (no o2 sensor) operation. It also allowed the o2 sensor to have too much authority over the fuel map without consideration for the other sensor readings.
To get the unmetered wifi calling, you had to pay $10/mo (didn't matter whether you were at a TMO hotspot, or any generic hotspot.) It is no longer offered, but it is grandfathered for those who already had it. Now wifi minutes are deducted like any plan minutes. So it really only makes sense to use it if you are in an area with poor voice coverage, or you can get it to work and are outside of the USA.
The T-mobile "Even More Plus" plans are pretty much exactly like this. As long as you have suitable credit, they will finance any phone you buy from them over 20 months (I'm pretty sure interest free), or you can pay the full amount. Though they still offer the old style plans that never decrease in price; they are called "Even More" plans.
Some of this may have changed with upgrades to yahoo/hotmail/aol, but most of this Gmail was doing first and better. Also note that I had a hotmail address in 1995 I believe and used it for several years. I used AOL for an ISP for about a year in 1999. But I never used the email account because their normal and web client were horrible even then. I also used yahoo web client for about 2 years, before I got my Gmail account a year into its release.
Gmail in my experience loads faster, and lets you start doing your next task before the previous one is finished. I can press send email, and while it is sending in the background, I can start composing another email or looking at my next email. Gmail uses labels, and you can assign multiple labels to a message, instead of only being able to put it in one folder. Gmail message search simply rocks, it always finds what I am looking for, yahoo message search simply stinks. Gmail has applets where I can chat with other gmail or AIM users in it, and I can see my remember the milk task list, and my google calendar, and I can see what the weather is tomorrow.
Don't get too excited. I think what parent is saying is if the call rolls to voicemail, they will give you 500 minutes of voicemail usage for free. Generally I am pretty sure on all carriers, if your caller leaves a 3 minute voicemail message, they will withdraw 3 minutes from your wireless minute pool.
The other thing they may be doing is since calling from your mobile to check T-mobile voicemail is free, they are giving you some bonus minutes to in effect check your messages for free by calling another phone number. I wonder if this credit applies only to that phone number, or if you could never check your messages from your mobile and get 500 more minutes to call anywhere.
As far as I know HTC doesn't sell direct to customer, unless you count the Nexus where they may be virtually drop shipping for Google.
Since none of HTC's partners like T*mobile or AT&T were interested in personally selling it, while at the same time giving Google penultimate control of the phone hardware and software specs to make it Best of Breed, that left Google to do the dirty work. When it is a raging hit they can't ignore, maybe they will put it on their shelves too.
HTC is about the only phone hardware manufacturer with the cajones to build devices with Google, and later with Snapdragons. They got a big jumpstart on companies like Motorola and Samsung because they had no legacy cellphone business. They got in at just the right time to hit the smartphone frenzy, and before they became big enough to really interest the Windows Mobile business unit at Microsoft. They rolled the dice on partnering with Google and won in a big way.
There used to be a $10/mo plan that gave unlimited minutes over UMA. They've depreciated it too for their Even More plans that encourage unlimited GSM minutes. If you are on an older plan, perhaps you can still get it?
I have no opinion on whether it is legal or not, but do you have reason to believe it could DoS devices that might see it outside of the home it is used in? Sounds like it places a call to the device. If you don't give it the right passcode, it doesn't call you or connect to that phone again. That doesn't mean it prevents your phone from using the regular cell tower in the neighborhood.
If there is no possible way you (or anyone with access to your computers) loaded an infringing file on your computer, then I suggest not mounting a defense, writing off those computers, and buying new. The RIAA would have to find something before they could take it in front of a judge and you'd be out any real money or time defending yourself.
In file sharing circumstances, people need lawyers immediately when they are either guilty, don't know what evidence might be on their computers, or feel there is a real threat of being framed. I believe the RIAA/MPAA is unethical, but I don't think they are devious to the point of trying to plant evidence. And if the chain of evidence isn't secure enough, when it goes before a judge, your lawyer (which you need by then) will tear it apart.
This is definitely a downer, but it is not such a risk that I'm willing to not act as a good citizen and allow my neighbors to occasionally borrow my internet. If I did, it'd be like I was allowing the RIAA/MPAA to be a "domestic terrorist." Personally though I have 3 computers in my house, together they are worth less than $1,000 and I keep a copy of all my files offsite. So that is all I'd be out. Given someone eles's circumstances this may be a good or bad deal for them.
I do not advise the following as a good defense method. But if you are truly innocent, they can subpoena your computers. If there is no evidence of infringing files, and no evidence you tried to delete or remove evidence of infringing files, they will have to settle for nothing, just like they did in the case you cited.
IANAL, but I bet there was a decent case to get compensatory damages in that case if the defendant had wanted to pursue it.
MAC spoofing is more like leaving the key underneath your doormat. The problem isn't the 99% who don't know how to do it. The problem is if you are unlucky enough to have the one-hundredth of 1% of people who are both knowledgeable and malicious, or haven't been socialized and don't understand how wrong it is like the geeky son of your neighbor.
If he can sneak onto your network, he can steal data you may be inadvertently sharing on your computers, or install viruses for fun or profit, or use it to order illegal items like satellite decoding equipment with stolen credit cards. You need to make it as hard as practical for these people to get in. The only way to do that is with WPA2 and AES (or at least the highest encryption your hardware supports). Anything else is false security.
I have been told Tomato doesn't support multiple SSIDs, which is required to do this. I am doing it with DD-WRT on my WRT54GL router. One SSID is WPA2 AES and the other for visitors and neighbors to share is open.
Interesting that Tomato routes much faster than HyperWRT. I have 15/2 service which is supposed to boost to 30/2 temporarily. I've never seen above 10. I've wondered if my router is slowing the show down. But I am also running a lot of services like QoS.
I admitted electricity was their better argument and not replacement parts (I was thinking upgraded processors and memory) because the computers were perceived to be running slower. Though I guess you could argue more hard drive replacements if he left the computers on over the summer, or at night, and that wasn't district tech policy.
But if policy was to leave computers on overnight for updates, then their case it cost them extra replacement parts is weak.
"massive software slowed down educational programs in every classroom and cost the district more than $1 million in added utility fees and computer replacement parts."
Knowing vaguely how SETI@home and BOINC and Folding@Home work, I suspect this is a BS allegation. I know the programs are not usually that large, though that doesn't really matter to the school district's alleged issue of it consuming otherwise needed comptuer resources. A big program can take very little CPU time. Usually the @home stuff is set up to only use idle computer cycles, and not affect other programs. If the school district is trying to make something up to charge him with theft of government resources, I think the increased electricity expense would be a better bet. I hope he has a good lawyer, and some kind of documentation that he was authorized (or had the perogative) to load the programs. Though it would have been better if his user name was "Higley" rather than "Nez".
I could probably get it purchased, though our company is well known for being very frugal and efficient with our cash. I have also suggested PostgreSQL or MySQL, which are plenty robust for this important, though not business critical function.
Before I came into the department, they had one catastrophic crash of the Access database we were able to restore from backup, losing only 1 day of data entry, and I worked for a day helping them make the Access database (which at that time didn't even have frontends/backend) more robust.
The problem would be what to install a real SQL server on after I had it. IT won't give us our own server playground, and they won't install software onto their servers unless it has gone through their build/deploy process.
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Don't confuse a cable worth $10 you bought for $100, with the placebo effect. Ones and zeros look the same to a TV with glasses or without.
Phone ring signal is also -90vdc, way higher than ethernet. Good ethernet cards have filters, but if you are unlucky, you could blow out the transceiver circuit in a cheap ethernet card when your phone rings.
My Myth frontend/backend with a Celeron 430 was unable to smoothly play HD MPEG2 recordings from live TV without VDPAU. It would sometimes do ok if it was a previously recorded, but I'd still get the occasional studder. I've also never been able to get any 3 of the HD digital capture cards I've tried set up and recording programs on the correct channel. So my experience with that is limited. I fell back to analog again.
Of course I should have realized VDPAU was deinterlacing. But my PVR-150 recordings frequently have jagged edges in the on screen playback. I hoped playing around with the deinterlacer would fix this, but I guess not. I wonder what could be the cause?
Any digital (ATSC or ClearQAM) tuner on the PCI slot should not take any more horsepower than writing the firewire tuner stream to disk. This is because the digital TV signal is already an encoded MPEG-2 stream that can also be sent pretty much straight to disk also.
A Hauppauge HD-PVR or PVR-x50 should also cause no problems, because they hardware encode a MPEG-2 or 4 stream and present it to your computer. Now if you have an analog tuner with software frame grabber, it will take a lot of horsepower. I am surprised the parent said he could do 1080i without VDPAU.
With VDPAU it would be cake walk for a P4 to write 4 hd streams to disk while watching one. The problem I would worry about is saturating the hard drive controller. You might need to be sure you have 2 disks on different controllers.
You are right currently, but Wave is intended long term (+5 years out) to be an email replacement, with many cool features that are currently not available, or are ugly grafts onto the email protocol. It most certainly isn't dead. I use it at least once a week. It was just released much earlier in the development cycle (like pre-alpha) than Gmail usually does with its "betas". Because of this, it is much harder to get an invitation. I only have 21 to give out, as opposed to 100 when I signed up with gmail.
I don't understand your disdain for the Gmail web enhancements. Personally I love most of them, and ignore the rest. But you can still turn almost every one of them off, and use Gmail just like it was 2001. They are even still offering the non-ajaxey html interface. Which I think is an amusing archaeology experiment.
Some new cars with electronically controlled transmissions may either try to lock you out of shifting from drive when it thinks you shouldn't. This can generally be overridden by really slamming the gear shift to neutral, breaking the locking mechanism. Or some cars now have no mechanical linkage between the shifter and transmission. In this case you flat can't do anything.
If your preferred method doesn't work, you need to be ready and willing to turn the car off rather than die in a flaming wreck. Most cars with this level of computer control probably won't lock the wheel unless the car is at a stop. Of course they shouldn't have failed in such a dangerous way either, so YMMV.
Hand brakes are usually cable operated (not hydraulic), and only operate the rear brakes. They can't apply that much force, nothing like standing on the regular brakes, and if the car is front wheel drive they have even less effectiveness because all the weight and power are on the wheels the hand brake is not connected to.
If that car was more than a couple years old, the car probably didn't have fly by wire throttle. So the o2 sensor didn't have control of anything besides fuel trim. What it did have was no good sensor diagnostic code so it could realize the o2 sensor was going bad and drop out of closed loop operation, and into open loop (no o2 sensor) operation. It also allowed the o2 sensor to have too much authority over the fuel map without consideration for the other sensor readings.
To get the unmetered wifi calling, you had to pay $10/mo (didn't matter whether you were at a TMO hotspot, or any generic hotspot.) It is no longer offered, but it is grandfathered for those who already had it. Now wifi minutes are deducted like any plan minutes. So it really only makes sense to use it if you are in an area with poor voice coverage, or you can get it to work and are outside of the USA.
The T-mobile "Even More Plus" plans are pretty much exactly like this. As long as you have suitable credit, they will finance any phone you buy from them over 20 months (I'm pretty sure interest free), or you can pay the full amount. Though they still offer the old style plans that never decrease in price; they are called "Even More" plans.
Some of this may have changed with upgrades to yahoo/hotmail/aol, but most of this Gmail was doing first and better. Also note that I had a hotmail address in 1995 I believe and used it for several years. I used AOL for an ISP for about a year in 1999. But I never used the email account because their normal and web client were horrible even then. I also used yahoo web client for about 2 years, before I got my Gmail account a year into its release.
Gmail in my experience loads faster, and lets you start doing your next task before the previous one is finished. I can press send email, and while it is sending in the background, I can start composing another email or looking at my next email. Gmail uses labels, and you can assign multiple labels to a message, instead of only being able to put it in one folder. Gmail message search simply rocks, it always finds what I am looking for, yahoo message search simply stinks. Gmail has applets where I can chat with other gmail or AIM users in it, and I can see my remember the milk task list, and my google calendar, and I can see what the weather is tomorrow.
QED, Gmail rocks!
Don't get too excited. I think what parent is saying is if the call rolls to voicemail, they will give you 500 minutes of voicemail usage for free. Generally I am pretty sure on all carriers, if your caller leaves a 3 minute voicemail message, they will withdraw 3 minutes from your wireless minute pool.
The other thing they may be doing is since calling from your mobile to check T-mobile voicemail is free, they are giving you some bonus minutes to in effect check your messages for free by calling another phone number. I wonder if this credit applies only to that phone number, or if you could never check your messages from your mobile and get 500 more minutes to call anywhere.
As far as I know HTC doesn't sell direct to customer, unless you count the Nexus where they may be virtually drop shipping for Google.
Since none of HTC's partners like T*mobile or AT&T were interested in personally selling it, while at the same time giving Google penultimate control of the phone hardware and software specs to make it Best of Breed, that left Google to do the dirty work. When it is a raging hit they can't ignore, maybe they will put it on their shelves too.
HTC is about the only phone hardware manufacturer with the cajones to build devices with Google, and later with Snapdragons. They got a big jumpstart on companies like Motorola and Samsung because they had no legacy cellphone business. They got in at just the right time to hit the smartphone frenzy, and before they became big enough to really interest the Windows Mobile business unit at Microsoft. They rolled the dice on partnering with Google and won in a big way.
According to their FAQ it uses 2 ports
magicJack uses port 5060 and 5070 UDP.
http://service.liveperson.net/hc/s-61732089/cmd/kbresource/kb-137415081868036450/view_question!PAGETYPE?sc=13&sf=101133&documentid=345562&action=view
There used to be a $10/mo plan that gave unlimited minutes over UMA. They've depreciated it too for their Even More plans that encourage unlimited GSM minutes. If you are on an older plan, perhaps you can still get it?
I looked it up, subpart G
http://www.fcc.gov/Bureaus/Engineering_Technology/Documents/cfr/1998/47cfr95.pdf
http://www.csgnetwork.com/lprsfreqtable.html
What section do those miniFM transmitters operate under for things like broadcasting your iPod in car? It doesn't look like it is Part 95.
I have no opinion on whether it is legal or not, but do you have reason to believe it could DoS devices that might see it outside of the home it is used in? Sounds like it places a call to the device. If you don't give it the right passcode, it doesn't call you or connect to that phone again. That doesn't mean it prevents your phone from using the regular cell tower in the neighborhood.
If there is no possible way you (or anyone with access to your computers) loaded an infringing file on your computer, then I suggest not mounting a defense, writing off those computers, and buying new. The RIAA would have to find something before they could take it in front of a judge and you'd be out any real money or time defending yourself.
In file sharing circumstances, people need lawyers immediately when they are either guilty, don't know what evidence might be on their computers, or feel there is a real threat of being framed. I believe the RIAA/MPAA is unethical, but I don't think they are devious to the point of trying to plant evidence. And if the chain of evidence isn't secure enough, when it goes before a judge, your lawyer (which you need by then) will tear it apart.
This is definitely a downer, but it is not such a risk that I'm willing to not act as a good citizen and allow my neighbors to occasionally borrow my internet. If I did, it'd be like I was allowing the RIAA/MPAA to be a "domestic terrorist." Personally though I have 3 computers in my house, together they are worth less than $1,000 and I keep a copy of all my files offsite. So that is all I'd be out. Given someone eles's circumstances this may be a good or bad deal for them.
I have exactly what you speak of using a WRT-54G and DD-WRT. Additionally more newly released routers are doing this as well in their stock firmware.
I do not advise the following as a good defense method. But if you are truly innocent, they can subpoena your computers. If there is no evidence of infringing files, and no evidence you tried to delete or remove evidence of infringing files, they will have to settle for nothing, just like they did in the case you cited.
IANAL, but I bet there was a decent case to get compensatory damages in that case if the defendant had wanted to pursue it.
MAC spoofing is more like leaving the key underneath your doormat. The problem isn't the 99% who don't know how to do it. The problem is if you are unlucky enough to have the one-hundredth of 1% of people who are both knowledgeable and malicious, or haven't been socialized and don't understand how wrong it is like the geeky son of your neighbor.
If he can sneak onto your network, he can steal data you may be inadvertently sharing on your computers, or install viruses for fun or profit, or use it to order illegal items like satellite decoding equipment with stolen credit cards. You need to make it as hard as practical for these people to get in. The only way to do that is with WPA2 and AES (or at least the highest encryption your hardware supports). Anything else is false security.
I have been told Tomato doesn't support multiple SSIDs, which is required to do this. I am doing it with DD-WRT on my WRT54GL router. One SSID is WPA2 AES and the other for visitors and neighbors to share is open.
Interesting that Tomato routes much faster than HyperWRT. I have 15/2 service which is supposed to boost to 30/2 temporarily. I've never seen above 10. I've wondered if my router is slowing the show down. But I am also running a lot of services like QoS.
I admitted electricity was their better argument and not replacement parts (I was thinking upgraded processors and memory) because the computers were perceived to be running slower. Though I guess you could argue more hard drive replacements if he left the computers on over the summer, or at night, and that wasn't district tech policy.
But if policy was to leave computers on overnight for updates, then their case it cost them extra replacement parts is weak.
"massive software slowed down educational programs in every classroom and cost the district more than $1 million in added utility fees and computer replacement parts."
Knowing vaguely how SETI@home and BOINC and Folding@Home work, I suspect this is a BS allegation. I know the programs are not usually that large, though that doesn't really matter to the school district's alleged issue of it consuming otherwise needed comptuer resources. A big program can take very little CPU time. Usually the @home stuff is set up to only use idle computer cycles, and not affect other programs. If the school district is trying to make something up to charge him with theft of government resources, I think the increased electricity expense would be a better bet. I hope he has a good lawyer, and some kind of documentation that he was authorized (or had the perogative) to load the programs. Though it would have been better if his user name was "Higley" rather than "Nez".
I could probably get it purchased, though our company is well known for being very frugal and efficient with our cash. I have also suggested PostgreSQL or MySQL, which are plenty robust for this important, though not business critical function.
Before I came into the department, they had one catastrophic crash of the Access database we were able to restore from backup, losing only 1 day of data entry, and I worked for a day helping them make the Access database (which at that time didn't even have frontends/backend) more robust.
The problem would be what to install a real SQL server on after I had it. IT won't give us our own server playground, and they won't install software onto their servers unless it has gone through their build/deploy process.