There's a huge difference between "not playable in" and "will destroy if played in". If their technology is specifically designed to do this or they release it knowing it will have this effect, then they are in a heap of trouble. Such intentional action is under the jurisdiction of the FBI computer crimes division as felony computer tresspass (the same as any "hacker" breaking into systems.) Every single person with so much as one molecule of their finger in this pie deserves prison time.
BAUD != bit per second "an analog phone line" != "an analog phone call"
There's only so much one can do with 8000 8bit PCM codes per second. As far as the PSTN is concerned, that's it! Engineers have been dreaming up more and more inventive ways to push digital data in an analog form. That's how we have 33.6k (V.34+) and 56k (x2,k56,v.90) -- 56k isn't really an analog encoding it's just straight PCM codes.
When you take the phone switch(es) out of the middle and try one end of the wire to the antenna of one radio and the other end to an other radio, yes, you can push a great deal of stuff across it. That's how DSL works. It is essitially a trapped radio signal.
I can't imagine why, but v.90 modems pretty much can only go above 28.8 when they are analog only on one side.
Then you clearly have no understanding of how modems (modern modems) work.
The whole "56k" thing is just an inventive trick. It works only because the ISP end is digital. That means the ISP hardware is transmitting pure digital crap to your modem in the form of discrete PCM codes which it knows will equal a specific analog value at the receiving modem -- and within some tolerance, it's consistant. It doesn't work in the other direction because the analog end cannot be sure of the exact PCM code to which it's analog output will coorespond and the conversion is highly inconsistant.
That's four things. And none of them are "very popular" to slashdot people. AIM is a worthless PoS that has wormed it's way into people's computers only because Netscape installs it without an option to prevent it.
ICQ, well, ICQ is just completely worthless -- I pay more attention to my email than I do ICQ. Hello! Email. Telephone. Cell phone. Pager. (That would make ICQ and AIM both lame excuses for a telephone.)
Winamp was dead as soon as AOL took over. I've not downloaded or used winamp for a long time now (well over a year.) Real jukebox 2 has the best organization of content (now ruined by the Mac clone UI of Real One)
Mozilla? You're joking right? I've never met anyone who liked the pile of shit that is Netscape 6. I'll buy 100 copies of Windows 3.1 before I bother with that load of crap. Bloatware at it's finest. (Go buy a copy of Opera.)
Wrong answer. That check box is hidden behind an "Advanced..." button that only a geek would push. Basically, if you don't know where this setting is, you're not going to know to turn it off. Microsoft defaulting this to "on" is just one of a long line of stupid things they do.
The people whose servers this is coming from are MORONS... They should be taken out back and shot...
Fine. And the very instant you make even the slightest mistake or oversite, someone will be there to collect your head. The problem is not large corporations (places with a sysadmin); it's the millions of mindless sheep with a PC (places that will never have a sysadmin.)
There are a lot of "Best Practices" that people should be doing. However, very few do simply because there isn't enough time in a day to setup and maintain everything the way things should. Everyone is overworked, under paid, and unappreciated -- most places have fired (layoff, downside, whatever) a significant portion of their staff thus significantly increasing the work load on those still there. Basically, if you could be fired tomorrow as a "cost saving measure", then why should you give a rats ass about doing anything beyond "it works"?
... and no URL containing 'http://www.hp.com/' will be cached. And before you tell me the same bullshit as microsoft, there is nothing at all in the communications to indicate it shouldn't be cached. Use any one of the IP addresses or simply "www.hp.com." (note: tailing period) and it caches just fine.
It happens in every version of IE on every version of Windows.
That assumes you have a support contract so they'll pay you any attention at all. Good luck simply getting the "feedback" page so you can submit a bug (which no one will ever look at.)
Where "arcane" is defined as utility regulations for "life line service"... 911 service requires a specific service availability (usuall 99.999% -- "5 nines") which *no* VoIP provider can maintain. As they have less than *zero* control over the delivery of their voice services end-to-end, you will likely never see anyone such as this capable of claiming "E911".
These regulations are there for the express purpose of keeping people alive. Placing your life in the hands of the cable monopoly or cluster-fsck of DSL providers is one gamble you best not take. While you might not have any problems with your broadband (currently), there's nothing to say you might not have trouble reaching the VoIP headend through the internet or that you will never have a problem with your connection. As it's a pure data, "best effort" service, no one is required to fix it so you can make a phone call. In fact, one could take steps to prevent VoIP from working at all.
Well, that says a lot about their efficiency. The PSTN is 64kbps at maximum -- 56kbps is the norm. Why would they need almost twice that? (With compression and silence suppression, they should need far less than that.)
Re:Could a relay be setup? Free long distance
on
VoIP for the Masses!
·
· Score: 1
And the RBOC's will be shitting multicolored kittens about it too.
Re:No DirecTV or Dish
on
PVR For Linux
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
And if you read enough, you'd see EchoStar intends on discarding *all* the DirecTV proprietary crap. They've budgeted for replacing every DSS receiver (with an active subscription I'd guess.) The people in the TiVo community have been rather disturbed by this (the dish play sucks very badly by comparison.) Fortunately, the OmegaDVD chips at the heart of the DTivo are designed to be DVB processors -- change the tivo software and associated microcode and *poof* DishTivo!
[Disclaimer: There's a lot of stuff behind that *poof*. As the Snafu cartoon once read, "I'm a little fuzzy on step two." [miracle occurs here]]
Re:No DirecTV or Dish
on
PVR For Linux
·
· Score: 5, Informative
DirectTV: NEVER (proprietary DSS system)
Dish: Maybe. It's at least the DVB standard.
Re:Wireless Monitor? Not happening...
on
Wireless Monitors?
·
· Score: 1
Yes. I know this. However, you miss the point. If one can send a T3 (45mbps) of digital information in 6MHz of space (modulated on a much higher frequency), then you have the capability to transmit a computer screen. The eyeball frying power requirements is a function of the carrier frequency (900MHz is done to death) and the desired range of the device. (Noise becomes a big problem when the signal isn't on a shielded wire.) Do current 802.11a/b devices blind people? No.
Granted, the T3 instance is a bad example as T3's are rarely radio signals -- and when they are, they are on highly directional microwave carriers.
Actually, 56k modems are a bad example -- they aren't entirely analog. Let's look at V.34+ (33.6k)... that's 33,600 bits per second using a 1800 Hz carrier.
Show me an ISP that doesn't over subscribe it's links and I'll show you an ISP that isn't making any money.
The fact is, most people don't use all of the bandwidth for which they are paying. The general rule is that at any given moment, 90% of the connections are using 10% of their bandwidth. I work for a business ISP (we don't target residential services; dialup, ADSL, etc.) and I can assure you that rule is generous.
However, in the residential world, there are no rules. ("If you sell it, they will want to use it.") And the slashdot readership is a very bad sample from which to draw.
Actually, it's quite the opposite. The more people you have monkeying in the dirt (or on the pole) the more likely they are to mess up other people's stuff. Some of it will be accidental, but a surprising amount will be intentional. We've already heard stories of people getting their cables cut (cable, phone, DSS) by "competitors" and those cables are very much separate. With all of them within inches of each other on *ahem* state owned right-of-ways, this sort of crap will happen every day.
And then there's the logicistical constraints. How many people will be allowed to string up their cables? There is a finite space on the *ahem* power companies poles and in the state's right-of-way. So, how many 8" water mains do you want in your front yard? There is a reason why we have public utilities. The fact that we are now using a public utility for something other than a public utility (internet access, broadband, etc.) is creating the problem.
Re:Wireless Monitor? Not happening...
on
Wireless Monitors?
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
The bandwidth requirements for a wireless monitor are impractical.
So, you're telling me "TV" is impractical? TV is bearly more than 640x480x24(?) but there are dozens of devices to transmit analog video around. And none of them "kill you, cook your intestines or give you a nice bout of cancer". (at least, not immediately.)
You have failed to make any distinction between the digital world of the computer and the analog world of RF radio. For example, a T3 is transmitted within 6MHz of analog space -- that's one cable TV channel, btw.
AND, you are assuming every pixel on the screen is changing 60 times per second. That's rarely true. And at any rate, it's far more efficient to send the function calls that are drawing the pixels instead of all half million pixels over and over again.
They don't "buy OC-48's..." either. They run their own fiber (at whatever speed they want) and have central internet x-connects that are usually OC-3's (and often, "low speed" OC-3 [115Mbps].) Add up all the costs... personel (admins, techs, managers, engineers, et. al.), hardware costs (headend, cpe, servers, etc.), office space, power, internet connectivity, etc. It's actually very expensive.
And then there's simple "supply and demand". If they sold cable modem service for $9.95 per month, everyone would have one and the entire system would begin to redefine "suck".
Ask yourself why you need a T3 to your kitchen? I've had ISDN for 6 years and that's plenty fast enough for reading slashdot, email, ssh, etc. Unless I'm downloading cd images, dvd rips, or large quantities of pr0n (or microsoft patches), there's not much difference between 128k and 1.5m.
(Oh, and I pay more for that ISDN line than all you idiots crying over the cost and stability of your cable modem. So shut up.)
... until you get your phone bill to find the fax number charged to *your* phone. Phone scams like that used to be abundant.
As for wasting paper, you assume there's a standard "plain paper" fax at the other end. By bet is there's a small bank of modems and a Windows box storing inbound faxes to disk (or/dev/null)
And which windows would that be? (3.11?) Unless you installed a 3rd party tcp stack, it's very difficult to be certain all elements of "windows networking" is gone. The newer the OS, the harder the process gets. If you're running 98 or later (or anything with that bullshit "active desktop"), then you do have IE installed (or at least parts of it.)
IT has become a haven for morons where having a clue means you are perceived as a threat to everyone elses job.
... or a threat to your own job. The company may like that you can perform miracles on command. They come to depend on your miracles. That dependance makes management types nervous and paranoid. On one hand, they want to get rid of you because of the growing dependance. But on the other hand, they're too worried by the fact that you've got your fingers in everything -- and they're the ones who put your fingers there...
Slashdot Mirror
There's a huge difference between "not playable in" and "will destroy if played in". If their technology is specifically designed to do this or they release it knowing it will have this effect, then they are in a heap of trouble. Such intentional action is under the jurisdiction of the FBI computer crimes division as felony computer tresspass (the same as any "hacker" breaking into systems.) Every single person with so much as one molecule of their finger in this pie deserves prison time.
BAUD != bit per second
"an analog phone line" != "an analog phone call"
There's only so much one can do with 8000 8bit PCM codes per second. As far as the PSTN is concerned, that's it! Engineers have been dreaming up more and more inventive ways to push digital data in an analog form. That's how we have 33.6k (V.34+) and 56k (x2,k56,v.90) -- 56k isn't really an analog encoding it's just straight PCM codes.
When you take the phone switch(es) out of the middle and try one end of the wire to the antenna of one radio and the other end to an other radio, yes, you can push a great deal of stuff across it. That's how DSL works. It is essitially a trapped radio signal.
- I can't imagine why, but v.90 modems pretty much can only go above 28.8 when they are analog only on one side.
Then you clearly have no understanding of how modems (modern modems) work.The whole "56k" thing is just an inventive trick. It works only because the ISP end is digital. That means the ISP hardware is transmitting pure digital crap to your modem in the form of discrete PCM codes which it knows will equal a specific analog value at the receiving modem -- and within some tolerance, it's consistant. It doesn't work in the other direction because the analog end cannot be sure of the exact PCM code to which it's analog output will coorespond and the conversion is highly inconsistant.
That's four things. And none of them are "very popular" to slashdot people. AIM is a worthless PoS that has wormed it's way into people's computers only because Netscape installs it without an option to prevent it.
ICQ, well, ICQ is just completely worthless -- I pay more attention to my email than I do ICQ. Hello! Email. Telephone. Cell phone. Pager. (That would make ICQ and AIM both lame excuses for a telephone.)
Winamp was dead as soon as AOL took over. I've not downloaded or used winamp for a long time now (well over a year.) Real jukebox 2 has the best organization of content (now ruined by the Mac clone UI of Real One)
Mozilla? You're joking right? I've never met anyone who liked the pile of shit that is Netscape 6. I'll buy 100 copies of Windows 3.1 before I bother with that load of crap. Bloatware at it's finest. (Go buy a copy of Opera.)
- The people whose servers this is coming from are MORONS
... They should be taken out back and shot...
Fine. And the very instant you make even the slightest mistake or oversite, someone will be there to collect your head. The problem is not large corporations (places with a sysadmin); it's the millions of mindless sheep with a PC (places that will never have a sysadmin.)There are a lot of "Best Practices" that people should be doing. However, very few do simply because there isn't enough time in a day to setup and maintain everything the way things should. Everyone is overworked, under paid, and unappreciated -- most places have fired (layoff, downside, whatever) a significant portion of their staff thus significantly increasing the work load on those still there. Basically, if you could be fired tomorrow as a "cost saving measure", then why should you give a rats ass about doing anything beyond "it works"?
- http://www.hp.com/products1/servers/operating/hpu
x . tml
.vs- http://www.hp.com./products1/servers/operating/hp
u x.html
Go look in your cache or the page properties. Try to save any of the images on the page.Yes, this is very stupid. And no, it does not appear to be intentional. (I'm guessing it's a problem in their cache hashing function(s).)
... and no URL containing 'http://www.hp.com/' will be cached. And before you tell me the same bullshit as microsoft, there is nothing at all in the communications to indicate it shouldn't be cached. Use any one of the IP addresses or simply "www.hp.com." (note: tailing period) and it caches just fine.
It happens in every version of IE on every version of Windows.
That assumes you have a support contract so they'll pay you any attention at all. Good luck simply getting the "feedback" page so you can submit a bug (which no one will ever look at.)
- Firewall be damned
... back door into it
... and be fired when they find it.Where "arcane" is defined as utility regulations for "life line service"... 911 service requires a specific service availability (usuall 99.999% -- "5 nines") which *no* VoIP provider can maintain. As they have less than *zero* control over the delivery of their voice services end-to-end, you will likely never see anyone such as this capable of claiming "E911".
These regulations are there for the express purpose of keeping people alive. Placing your life in the hands of the cable monopoly or cluster-fsck of DSL providers is one gamble you best not take. While you might not have any problems with your broadband (currently), there's nothing to say you might not have trouble reaching the VoIP headend through the internet or that you will never have a problem with your connection. As it's a pure data, "best effort" service, no one is required to fix it so you can make a phone call. In fact, one could take steps to prevent VoIP from working at all.
"E911" provides additional data and services to the 911 call center (phone number, address, etc.)
Well, that says a lot about their efficiency. The PSTN is 64kbps at maximum -- 56kbps is the norm. Why would they need almost twice that? (With compression and silence suppression, they should need far less than that.)
And the RBOC's will be shitting multicolored kittens about it too.
And if you read enough, you'd see EchoStar intends on discarding *all* the DirecTV proprietary crap. They've budgeted for replacing every DSS receiver (with an active subscription I'd guess.) The people in the TiVo community have been rather disturbed by this (the dish play sucks very badly by comparison.) Fortunately, the OmegaDVD chips at the heart of the DTivo are designed to be DVB processors -- change the tivo software and associated microcode and *poof* DishTivo!
[Disclaimer: There's a lot of stuff behind that *poof*. As the Snafu cartoon once read, "I'm a little fuzzy on step two." [miracle occurs here]]
DirectTV: NEVER (proprietary DSS system)
Dish: Maybe. It's at least the DVB standard.
Yes. I know this. However, you miss the point. If one can send a T3 (45mbps) of digital information in 6MHz of space (modulated on a much higher frequency), then you have the capability to transmit a computer screen. The eyeball frying power requirements is a function of the carrier frequency (900MHz is done to death) and the desired range of the device. (Noise becomes a big problem when the signal isn't on a shielded wire.) Do current 802.11a/b devices blind people? No.
Granted, the T3 instance is a bad example as T3's are rarely radio signals -- and when they are, they are on highly directional microwave carriers.
Actually, 56k modems are a bad example -- they aren't entirely analog. Let's look at V.34+ (33.6k)... that's 33,600 bits per second using a 1800 Hz carrier.
No, the biggest fallacy is that "bandwidth is free." That's been the mantra for years and it's *never* been true.
Show me an ISP that doesn't over subscribe it's links and I'll show you an ISP that isn't making any money.
The fact is, most people don't use all of the bandwidth for which they are paying. The general rule is that at any given moment, 90% of the connections are using 10% of their bandwidth. I work for a business ISP (we don't target residential services; dialup, ADSL, etc.) and I can assure you that rule is generous.
However, in the residential world, there are no rules. ("If you sell it, they will want to use it.") And the slashdot readership is a very bad sample from which to draw.
Actually, it's quite the opposite. The more people you have monkeying in the dirt (or on the pole) the more likely they are to mess up other people's stuff. Some of it will be accidental, but a surprising amount will be intentional. We've already heard stories of people getting their cables cut (cable, phone, DSS) by "competitors" and those cables are very much separate. With all of them within inches of each other on *ahem* state owned right-of-ways, this sort of crap will happen every day.
And then there's the logicistical constraints. How many people will be allowed to string up their cables? There is a finite space on the *ahem* power companies poles and in the state's right-of-way. So, how many 8" water mains do you want in your front yard? There is a reason why we have public utilities. The fact that we are now using a public utility for something other than a public utility (internet access, broadband, etc.) is creating the problem.
- The bandwidth requirements for a wireless monitor are impractical.
So, you're telling me "TV" is impractical? TV is bearly more than 640x480x24(?) but there are dozens of devices to transmit analog video around. And none of them "kill you, cook your intestines or give you a nice bout of cancer". (at least, not immediately.)You have failed to make any distinction between the digital world of the computer and the analog world of RF radio. For example, a T3 is transmitted within 6MHz of analog space -- that's one cable TV channel, btw.
AND, you are assuming every pixel on the screen is changing 60 times per second. That's rarely true. And at any rate, it's far more efficient to send the function calls that are drawing the pixels instead of all half million pixels over and over again.
They don't "buy OC-48's..." either. They run their own fiber (at whatever speed they want) and have central internet x-connects that are usually OC-3's (and often, "low speed" OC-3 [115Mbps].) Add up all the costs... personel (admins, techs, managers, engineers, et. al.), hardware costs (headend, cpe, servers, etc.), office space, power, internet connectivity, etc. It's actually very expensive.
And then there's simple "supply and demand". If they sold cable modem service for $9.95 per month, everyone would have one and the entire system would begin to redefine "suck".
Ask yourself why you need a T3 to your kitchen? I've had ISDN for 6 years and that's plenty fast enough for reading slashdot, email, ssh, etc. Unless I'm downloading cd images, dvd rips, or large quantities of pr0n (or microsoft patches), there's not much difference between 128k and 1.5m.
(Oh, and I pay more for that ISDN line than all you idiots crying over the cost and stability of your cable modem. So shut up.)
Billing them is the easy part. Getting them to pay it is next to impossible -- and exceedingly expensive.
... until you get your phone bill to find the fax number charged to *your* phone. Phone scams like that used to be abundant.
/dev/null)
As for wasting paper, you assume there's a standard "plain paper" fax at the other end. By bet is there's a small bank of modems and a Windows box storing inbound faxes to disk (or
- IT has become a haven for morons where having a clue means you are perceived as a threat to everyone elses job.
... or a threat to your own job. The company may like that you can perform miracles on command. They come to depend on your miracles. That dependance makes management types nervous and paranoid. On one hand, they want to get rid of you because of the growing dependance. But on the other hand, they're too worried by the fact that you've got your fingers in everything -- and they're the ones who put your fingers there...