How about people who prefer NOT to do any lossy data compression in the camera?
I would MUCH rather store a full RAW or TIFF image (perhaps losslessly compressed with RLE) and have ALL THE DATA, rather than having to work around the JPEG compression artifacts.
Just about every contract you sign these days has really vaguely worded clauses about them being able to terminate your account for any reason they decide...
Which does not mean that clause has any validity in court - I could put a clause in a contract requiring you to wear a rubber duck on your head when you sleep. However, should you challenge it in court, it would most likely be held to be unenforcable.
Once again, this is a standard modern day business tactic - "See if we can get away with it. If they call us, cut a deal. Otherwise, screw them 'till they bleed from the eyes."
Most DSL connections are charged per GB of transfer.
Source, please - where do you get your information?
I cannot speak for "most", but neither my DSL nor that of the three other people I know personally who have DSL have any cap on their transfers save the cap set by the number of B channels assigned to their connection.
Challenge them. Pull out your copy of your service agreement, and verify that there is no statement of limits on that.
Then verify the on-line copy, since they will claim that is the controlling version.
Assuming you cannot find a statement that says "You agree to use not more than X bandwidth per Y period of time", then challenge them. Inform them that unless they can show a contract, with your signature, that binds you to that agreement, you will consider any termination a breach of contract and will pursue it as such.
Make them tell you exactly what the limits are, and what you usage is.
This is classic modern business - "Try to screw them, since they don't know their rights. If they bitch, back off."
BUT MAKE SURE THEY DON'T HAVE A LIMIT IN THE AUP FIRST!
I respectfully disagree with your assertion that having one of (house|senate|pres) be a different party would prevent "out of sunshine" legislation - plenty of laws have been snuck through when there were different parties in control.
I assert that the only way to prevent this sort of stuff is to require that ALL laws must stand for at least 1 year public scruteny (e.g. be available online, and at public libraries), and then the only allowable vote is YES or NO - any changes restart the clock.
Consider this "open source" law - everybody gets to see what will be voted upon (not some sanitized version that has yet to be buggered in committee) - any funny business will be dragged kicking and screaming into the light of day, to burst into flames and die (sorry, but Angel is running in the other room).
The ONLY laws that I would allow to bypass this would be "emergency" laws, which would be under the following restrictions: 1) May only run for 18 months, with no possiblity of renewal. 2) May NOT create any permanent offices, penalties, etc. 3) Must be 1000 words or less.
Should the courts find a given "emergency" law to be substantially similar to any other law, it is IMMEDIATELY struck down.
In short, when trying to solve a problem (laws being passed in the dead of night with nobody around), DIRECTLY address the problem.
Of course, to make something like this stick, it would have to be a Constitutional Amendment. Thus, the real probability of this occuring in this day and age is slightly less than the probability of my inventing a time machine and getting this written into the original Constitution.
Well, there is a lot of analog out there, more than digital, but that's not really the problem - the problem is the "digital cliff" effect.
With AMPS, as the signal gets weaker, the audio noise floor comes up, and you get wideband static on the signal. Wideband static is fairly benign, in that humans aren't as offended by it (since it sounds like the surf). The user of the phone knows he is getting out of range well before the call drops, and so usually can terminate the call gracefully.
With digital, you get no real degradation of the signal so long as the channel bit error rate is less than the channel's error recovery capability. But when the BER gets above that threshold, then the quality drops dramatically. Moreover, the loss of quality is expressed as garbled vocoder output (I've always described it as "watery" - it sounds like you have water in your ears), or as complete failures of the vocoder (dropouts). Those are VERY offensive to the ear.
Also, the difference between a signal level that gives you a fully correctable BER and a signal level that gives you a BER bad enough the phone drops is almost nil - so just changing position can drop the call without warning.
Personally, if the phone makers would tie the received signal strength indicator (RSSI) into a variable noise generator, so that as the RSSI fell you started to get static, I think most people wouldn't bitch so badly about dropped calls.
There is also the problem that the usual vocoders for phone use are compressing the crap out of the signal - taking a 64 kb/second audio stream down to less than 4kb/sec. VSELP, IMBE and AMBE all do OK when fed voice in isolation, but put in any background noise and they get "confused" - they start making poor choices about the vectors they encode, and what comes out the other end is pretty rocky.
I had great fun feeding the first few seconds of Kansas's "Carry On Wayward Son" into an APCO-25 IMBE vocoder. While there is nothing but voice there, it is a chorus, and the poor vocoder just couldn't figure out what was going on.
What we call "RAM" (Random Access Memory) really isn't all that good at random access.
When you read a location of RAM, the RAM chips have to read the entire row that location lives in. For a memory that is 256 million locations (where a location could be a bit, or a byte, or even a dword, depending upon the memory's layout), to read a location means loading 16 thousand locations into the sense amps of the chip.
Now, once you've fetched the data into the sense amps, reading the rest of the row out can happen much faster than that initial access.
CPUs tend to access things more or less sequentially when it comes to code (modulo jumps, calls, interrupts, and context switches), but data isn't quite as nice.
Video, on the other hand, is great from the DRAM controller's point of view - it can grab an entire row of data and shove it into the display controller's shift register. And wonder of wonders, the next request from the video refresh system is going to be the very next row!
So while video refresh does take bandwidth, in many ways driving the video controller is "cheaper" than feeding the CPU.
(the details in this post GREATLY simplified for brevity)
Well, in all my testing of running 16 bit apps, a Pentium I outran a similarly clocked P4 by a healthy margin - so obviously the Pentium is a better chip, right? </sarcasm>
Seriously - For a period of time the A64 will be running mostly 32 bit apps (at least in the Windows world), and so it is fair to benchmark its performance against 32 bit apps. But I cannot help but wonder how much P4 tweaking all those apps had, and how much A64 tweaking they did not have.
Also, the memory performance tests are, to my mind, somewhat questionable as well, as different CPUs even within the Pentium line have different memory access behavior - code that will be bus limited on a P4 might not be bus limited on a P3.
I am not saying the comparisons are not useful, but I am saying that they don't tell the whole story. Let us see some benchmarks wherein the A64 is running code that is written for the A64 - using the extra registers and so on.
The Better Business Bureau is a paper tiger - just because a company is listed as "satisfactory" with them does not mean the company is not a wretched hive of scum and villany.
The BBB used to be feared and respected - threatening a company with "I'll report you to the BBB" caused great gnashing of teeth and usually got things fixed quickly.
But little by little, companies realised that they could target the BBB with lawsuits for definition^Wdefamation of character. They realised that they could join the BBB, and thus slowly subvert its goals toward their own ends.
Little by little the BBB became flooded with reports, and little by little the BBB began to pursue only the most egregious examples of behavior - ignoring little things to concentrate on "what really matters".
Little by little, the response to "I'll report you to the BBB" became <voice name="butthead">"Yawn Yeah, whatever, go 'way, you suck"</voice>
True, if you find a company listed as "unsatisfactory" by the BBB you should run as though the very demons of hell pursued thee, but assuming that a clean bill of health from the BBB means that a company is clean is a very WRONG leap of faith.
(For fun, you can go through the above with the following replacements and it will be equally valid:
If you are having problems getting up, then DON'T USE SNOOZE!
You are just training yourself in a bad habit - "Don't need get up. Go sleep more. Noise not important".
Instead, put whatever you use to awaken yourself out of reach of the bed - preferably on the other side of the room. MAKE yourself get up and walk over to the alarm to turn it off. Then, KEEP MOVING - go fix your coffee or whatever you do when you get up.
Speaking of coffee - should you be an imbiber of morning caffinated hot beverages, invest in a timer controlled coffee pot. Set it to start about 10 minutes before your alarm goes off. Put it in a place where the aroma of brewing coffee (or whatever) will reach you.
Most people are training themselves to be insomniacs - watching TV or reading in bed, staying up to catch that "gotta see it" show instead of sleeping when they are tired, hitting snooze in the mornings. Beds should be used for two things only - sleep and sex. Anything else should be done elsewhere.
I trained myself to go to sleep within minutes of hitting the bed in college, when I had Calc II at 7:30 and my next class was at 10:30 - go to calc, go back to room, sleep some more, then go to chemistry. I refined this when I was working 80 hours a week at my first job - go home over lunch, catch a 30 minute powernap, then back to work. As I understand it, this is also what the various military services train you to do - "Don't stand if you can sit. Don't sit if you can lie down. If you can lie down, go to sleep."
Person spends long hours working with computer. Person creates virtual object. Person loses virtual object due to crackers exploiting software bug. Person sues maker of software for restoration of virtual object. Person wins in court.
OK....
So, can a person sue Microsoft to restore all the word processing documents they have lost due to crashes? Can they sue Microsoft for the files lost when a web site is defaced due to an IIS bug?
Begin RANT:
All these stories of people getting so wrapped up in various online games just indicate to me that some people have a) Too DAMN much time on their hands, and b) a complete ABSENCE of a sense of proportion.
Just 200 years ago, most people were too focused on TRYING TO STAY ALIVE.
Now we have people with nothing better to do than to sue other people over make-believe!
Is that progress, or what?
(and that question is asked in all seriousness - I tend toward "or what" myself....)
In Harry Harrison's "Stainless Steel Rat" series, one of the central tenets of the lead character, "Slippery" Jim DeGriz, the most wanted interstellar criminal, was "When a con finally starts going bad, walk away - don't try to cash that last check". Hence he very rarely got caught.
It is the same thing here - the folks who are smart enough to walk away before things go south are never caught - thus we never really hear about them in the news. The only ones we hear about are the stupid ones who cash the last check and get busted.
I once heard a cop say "I've been throwing these punks up against the wall for 20 years, and I've never once found a Mensa card in their pockets."
By "city juice", are you perhaps referring to what has been called "Mystery Moisture" - the anomalous puddles of liquid[1] that seem to appear on the city sidewalks independant of any normal precipitation?
Prohibition doesn't work when it conflicts with what the majority want. The majority wanted alcohol during the 1920's, and were willing to violate the law to get it.
That's got no bearing on spam, which the majority doesn't want, just like the majority doesn't want murder, rape, carjacking, fraud, embezzlement, or any other number of illegal activities.
Almost correct, but while I think you understand the fundimental truth here, you are misapplying it.
The fundimental truth is "Where there is demand, there will be supply." All laws can do is change the supply vs. price curve - society sets the demand vs. price curve.
The problem is that it is NOT we-who-receive-the-spam who demand spam - it is the scummy bastards who wish to hawk their wares (or warez) or simply to rip us off who demand spam.
In that regard, banning spam will only raise the price vs. supply curve - the demand vs. price curve will be unchanged.
However, the difference between spam and booze is that the demand vs. price curve for booze remains fairly constant until the price gets very large, while the demand vs. price curve for spam rolls off VERY rapidly as soon as the cost of spamming rises (at least, I *HOPE* that to be the case!)
And upon this rests the success of any anti-spam legislation: does it raise the price vs supply curve enough to shift the intersection with the demand vs price curve to a point of enough lower volume to make a difference?
This is also why "Just Hit Delete" is such TERRIBLE advice - JHD does NOT alter the demand vs. price curve. Giving holy hell to any remotely respectable businessman who uses spam can shift that curve. That is why I keep nailing Sears any time I get a spam from one of their affiliates advertising siding.
SSH port forwarding isn't "TCP over TCP" - the SSH client isn't simply sending the TCP packets over the wire, it is sending the contents over.
Suppose we have 2 computers, A and B, connected via SSH, and forwarding some service. A sends a block of data to B.
The sequence is NOT: A packaged data into TCP packet. SSH encrypts packet and packages it into another TCP packet B receives SSH packet and acks it B decryptes packet B acks that packet.
The sequence IS: A packages data into TCP packet SSH receives and acks packet. SSH encrypts PAYLOAD of TCP packet SSH sends packet B receives SSH packet and acks it B extracts data. B packages data into local TCP packet, sends it, acks it locally.
So you don't get into the cascade failure mode for TCP over TCP.
Now, if you use your SSH connection to forward PPP data over the wire - THEN you are getting into TCP over TCP because the SSH session is actually forwarding the PPP packets.
This holiday season just keeps getting better and better - MS losing ("loosing" for those of you who learned to spell from/.) Office customers, SCO being told to put up or shut up, David Boies being up on possible ethics violations, Saddam Hussein in custody, RotK released, Athlon64 systems shipping, a spammer in Virginia being hit with felony spamming charges, now this.
Here's a simple analysis to determine if now is the time:
Figure that between now and summer, the price of an Athlon64 system with a given set of specs (RAM, HD, video card, etc.) will go down about US$500.
So, ask yourself this - is $500 over the next six months worth it?
If you are making money with this machine - you are a consultant, or do freelance work that earns money, will the roughly 40% speed improvement make you back that $500 in six months?
If you are a hobbist, will the "fun" of being one of the first people on the block with an Athlon64 be worth $500 over the next six months?
Me, I am looking at the Atlon 2000+ I'm typing this on, with the Radeon 7500, and saying "I'll wait". But that's me.
Your point about the overuse of antimicrobials like triclosan is correct, but I am not talking about antimicrobials - I am talking about "Nuke'm till they glow, shoot them in the dark, and and let $DEITY sort them out" antiseptics, like sodium hypoclorite, hydrogen peroxide, Lysol, and the like.
Nothing short of an extremophile will survive those to engender resistance.
No matter what technology you choose for the displays, I would suggest having a box of cleaning wipes near the screen - preferably the kind that have Clorox or some other strong antiseptic in them.
I have to wonder if the problem of handwriting recognition is easier for languages that use an ideographic written form rather than an alphabetic form.
The biggest problem for somebody like me is the computer determining if I wrote "please" or "cheese" (yes, my handwriting is that bad). I would think that in an ideographic language it would be a lot easier for the system to sort through the known ideographs.
Slashdot Mirror
How about people who prefer NOT to do any lossy data compression in the camera?
I would MUCH rather store a full RAW or TIFF image (perhaps losslessly compressed with RLE) and have ALL THE DATA, rather than having to work around the JPEG compression artifacts.
Which does not mean that clause has any validity in court - I could put a clause in a contract requiring you to wear a rubber duck on your head when you sleep. However, should you challenge it in court, it would most likely be held to be unenforcable.
Once again, this is a standard modern day business tactic - "See if we can get away with it. If they call us, cut a deal. Otherwise, screw them 'till they bleed from the eyes."
Source, please - where do you get your information?
I cannot speak for "most", but neither my DSL nor that of the three other people I know personally who have DSL have any cap on their transfers save the cap set by the number of B channels assigned to their connection.
Challenge them. Pull out your copy of your service agreement, and verify that there is no statement of limits on that.
Then verify the on-line copy, since they will claim that is the controlling version.
Assuming you cannot find a statement that says "You agree to use not more than X bandwidth per Y period of time", then challenge them. Inform them that unless they can show a contract, with your signature, that binds you to that agreement, you will consider any termination a breach of contract and will pursue it as such.
Make them tell you exactly what the limits are, and what you usage is.
This is classic modern business - "Try to screw them, since they don't know their rights. If they bitch, back off."
BUT MAKE SURE THEY DON'T HAVE A LIMIT IN THE AUP FIRST!
There are three simple steps to network security - follow them to the letter and you will never have any problems.
The three steps are:
1) Ban Windows from your network.
2) Ban Doors.
3) Ban Users.
Follow those steps and you will never have any problems!
I respectfully disagree with your assertion that having one of (house|senate|pres) be a different party would prevent "out of sunshine" legislation - plenty of laws have been snuck through when there were different parties in control.
I assert that the only way to prevent this sort of stuff is to require that ALL laws must stand for at least 1 year public scruteny (e.g. be available online, and at public libraries), and then the only allowable vote is YES or NO - any changes restart the clock.
Consider this "open source" law - everybody gets to see what will be voted upon (not some sanitized version that has yet to be buggered in committee) - any funny business will be dragged kicking and screaming into the light of day, to burst into flames and die (sorry, but Angel is running in the other room).
The ONLY laws that I would allow to bypass this would be "emergency" laws, which would be under the following restrictions:
1) May only run for 18 months, with no possiblity of renewal.
2) May NOT create any permanent offices, penalties, etc.
3) Must be 1000 words or less.
Should the courts find a given "emergency" law to be substantially similar to any other law, it is IMMEDIATELY struck down.
In short, when trying to solve a problem (laws being passed in the dead of night with nobody around), DIRECTLY address the problem.
Of course, to make something like this stick, it would have to be a Constitutional Amendment. Thus, the real probability of this occuring in this day and age is slightly less than the probability of my inventing a time machine and getting this written into the original Constitution.
Well, there is a lot of analog out there, more than digital, but that's not really the problem - the problem is the "digital cliff" effect.
With AMPS, as the signal gets weaker, the audio noise floor comes up, and you get wideband static on the signal. Wideband static is fairly benign, in that humans aren't as offended by it (since it sounds like the surf). The user of the phone knows he is getting out of range well before the call drops, and so usually can terminate the call gracefully.
With digital, you get no real degradation of the signal so long as the channel bit error rate is less than the channel's error recovery capability. But when the BER gets above that threshold, then the quality drops dramatically. Moreover, the loss of quality is expressed as garbled vocoder output (I've always described it as "watery" - it sounds like you have water in your ears), or as complete failures of the vocoder (dropouts). Those are VERY offensive to the ear.
Also, the difference between a signal level that gives you a fully correctable BER and a signal level that gives you a BER bad enough the phone drops is almost nil - so just changing position can drop the call without warning.
Personally, if the phone makers would tie the received signal strength indicator (RSSI) into a variable noise generator, so that as the RSSI fell you started to get static, I think most people wouldn't bitch so badly about dropped calls.
There is also the problem that the usual vocoders for phone use are compressing the crap out of the signal - taking a 64 kb/second audio stream down to less than 4kb/sec. VSELP, IMBE and AMBE all do OK when fed voice in isolation, but put in any background noise and they get "confused" - they start making poor choices about the vectors they encode, and what comes out the other end is pretty rocky.
I had great fun feeding the first few seconds of Kansas's "Carry On Wayward Son" into an APCO-25 IMBE vocoder. While there is nothing but voice there, it is a chorus, and the poor vocoder just couldn't figure out what was going on.
What we call "RAM" (Random Access Memory) really isn't all that good at random access.
When you read a location of RAM, the RAM chips have to read the entire row that location lives in. For a memory that is 256 million locations (where a location could be a bit, or a byte, or even a dword, depending upon the memory's layout), to read a location means loading 16 thousand locations into the sense amps of the chip.
Now, once you've fetched the data into the sense amps, reading the rest of the row out can happen much faster than that initial access.
CPUs tend to access things more or less sequentially when it comes to code (modulo jumps, calls, interrupts, and context switches), but data isn't quite as nice.
Video, on the other hand, is great from the DRAM controller's point of view - it can grab an entire row of data and shove it into the display controller's shift register. And wonder of wonders, the next request from the video refresh system is going to be the very next row!
So while video refresh does take bandwidth, in many ways driving the video controller is "cheaper" than feeding the CPU.
(the details in this post GREATLY simplified for brevity)
Well, in all my testing of running 16 bit apps, a Pentium I outran a similarly clocked P4 by a healthy margin - so obviously the Pentium is a better chip, right?
</sarcasm>
Seriously - For a period of time the A64 will be running mostly 32 bit apps (at least in the Windows world), and so it is fair to benchmark its performance against 32 bit apps. But I cannot help but wonder how much P4 tweaking all those apps had, and how much A64 tweaking they did not have.
Also, the memory performance tests are, to my mind, somewhat questionable as well, as different CPUs even within the Pentium line have different memory access behavior - code that will be bus limited on a P4 might not be bus limited on a P3.
I am not saying the comparisons are not useful, but I am saying that they don't tell the whole story. Let us see some benchmarks wherein the A64 is running code that is written for the A64 - using the extra registers and so on.
The Better Business Bureau is a paper tiger - just because a company is listed as "satisfactory" with them does not mean the company is not a wretched hive of scum and villany.
The BBB used to be feared and respected - threatening a company with "I'll report you to the BBB" caused great gnashing of teeth and usually got things fixed quickly.
But little by little, companies realised that they could target the BBB with lawsuits for definition^Wdefamation of character. They realised that they could join the BBB, and thus slowly subvert its goals toward their own ends.
Little by little the BBB became flooded with reports, and little by little the BBB began to pursue only the most egregious examples of behavior - ignoring little things to concentrate on "what really matters".
Little by little, the response to "I'll report you to the BBB" became <voice name="butthead">" Yawn Yeah, whatever, go 'way, you suck"</voice>
True, if you find a company listed as "unsatisfactory" by the BBB you should run as though the very demons of hell pursued thee, but assuming that a clean bill of health from the BBB means that a company is clean is a very WRONG leap of faith.
(For fun, you can go through the above with the following replacements and it will be equally valid:
s/BBB/MAPS/g
or
s/businesses/posters/g && s/BBB/moderators/g
)
If you are having problems getting up, then DON'T USE SNOOZE!
You are just training yourself in a bad habit - "Don't need get up. Go sleep more. Noise not important".
Instead, put whatever you use to awaken yourself out of reach of the bed - preferably on the other side of the room. MAKE yourself get up and walk over to the alarm to turn it off. Then, KEEP MOVING - go fix your coffee or whatever you do when you get up.
Speaking of coffee - should you be an imbiber of morning caffinated hot beverages, invest in a timer controlled coffee pot. Set it to start about 10 minutes before your alarm goes off. Put it in a place where the aroma of brewing coffee (or whatever) will reach you.
Most people are training themselves to be insomniacs - watching TV or reading in bed, staying up to catch that "gotta see it" show instead of sleeping when they are tired, hitting snooze in the mornings. Beds should be used for two things only - sleep and sex. Anything else should be done elsewhere.
I trained myself to go to sleep within minutes of hitting the bed in college, when I had Calc II at 7:30 and my next class was at 10:30 - go to calc, go back to room, sleep some more, then go to chemistry. I refined this when I was working 80 hours a week at my first job - go home over lunch, catch a 30 minute powernap, then back to work. As I understand it, this is also what the various military services train you to do - "Don't stand if you can sit. Don't sit if you can lie down. If you can lie down, go to sleep."
OK, let me get this straight:
Person spends long hours working with computer.
Person creates virtual object.
Person loses virtual object due to crackers exploiting software bug.
Person sues maker of software for restoration of virtual object.
Person wins in court.
OK....
So, can a person sue Microsoft to restore all the word processing documents they have lost due to crashes? Can they sue Microsoft for the files lost when a web site is defaced due to an IIS bug?
Begin RANT:
All these stories of people getting so wrapped up in various online games just indicate to me that some people have
a) Too DAMN much time on their hands, and
b) a complete ABSENCE of a sense of proportion.
Just 200 years ago, most people were too focused on TRYING TO STAY ALIVE.
Now we have people with nothing better to do than to sue other people over make-believe!
Is that progress, or what?
(and that question is asked in all seriousness - I tend toward "or what" myself....)
In Harry Harrison's "Stainless Steel Rat" series, one of the central tenets of the lead character, "Slippery" Jim DeGriz, the most wanted interstellar criminal, was "When a con finally starts going bad, walk away - don't try to cash that last check". Hence he very rarely got caught.
It is the same thing here - the folks who are smart enough to walk away before things go south are never caught - thus we never really hear about them in the news. The only ones we hear about are the stupid ones who cash the last check and get busted.
I once heard a cop say "I've been throwing these punks up against the wall for 20 years, and I've never once found a Mensa card in their pockets."
Me, I want a pussywillow myself.
By "city juice", are you perhaps referring to what has been called "Mystery Moisture" - the anomalous puddles of liquid[1] that seem to appear on the city sidewalks independant of any normal precipitation?
Or something else?
[1] a.k.a. urine
Besides - can you imagine an entire audience of geeks at the Luxor watching Blue Man Group?
I honestly don't know who would be stranger - the performers or the audience....
Almost correct, but while I think you understand the fundimental truth here, you are misapplying it.
The fundimental truth is "Where there is demand, there will be supply." All laws can do is change the supply vs. price curve - society sets the demand vs. price curve.
The problem is that it is NOT we-who-receive-the-spam who demand spam - it is the scummy bastards who wish to hawk their wares (or warez) or simply to rip us off who demand spam.
In that regard, banning spam will only raise the price vs. supply curve - the demand vs. price curve will be unchanged.
However, the difference between spam and booze is that the demand vs. price curve for booze remains fairly constant until the price gets very large, while the demand vs. price curve for spam rolls off VERY rapidly as soon as the cost of spamming rises (at least, I *HOPE* that to be the case!)
And upon this rests the success of any anti-spam legislation: does it raise the price vs supply curve enough to shift the intersection with the demand vs price curve to a point of enough lower volume to make a difference?
This is also why "Just Hit Delete" is such TERRIBLE advice - JHD does NOT alter the demand vs. price curve. Giving holy hell to any remotely respectable businessman who uses spam can shift that curve. That is why I keep nailing Sears any time I get a spam from one of their affiliates advertising siding.
Saint Louis - a bit easier for the middle of the country, a more even split for the coasts, decent airport, some good things to do locally.
Dallas/Ft. Worth - same reasons.
SSH port forwarding isn't "TCP over TCP" - the SSH client isn't simply sending the TCP packets over the wire, it is sending the contents over.
Suppose we have 2 computers, A and B, connected via SSH, and forwarding some service. A sends a block of data to B.
The sequence is NOT:
A packaged data into TCP packet.
SSH encrypts packet and packages it into another TCP packet
B receives SSH packet and acks it
B decryptes packet
B acks that packet.
The sequence IS:
A packages data into TCP packet
SSH receives and acks packet.
SSH encrypts PAYLOAD of TCP packet
SSH sends packet
B receives SSH packet and acks it
B extracts data.
B packages data into local TCP packet, sends it, acks it locally.
So you don't get into the cascade failure mode for TCP over TCP.
Now, if you use your SSH connection to forward PPP data over the wire - THEN you are getting into TCP over TCP because the SSH session is actually forwarding the PPP packets.
This holiday season just keeps getting better and better - MS losing ("loosing" for those of you who learned to spell from /.) Office customers, SCO being told to put up or shut up, David Boies being up on possible ethics violations, Saddam Hussein in custody, RotK released, Athlon64 systems shipping, a spammer in Virginia being hit with felony spamming charges, now this.
Thank you Santa!
Here's a simple analysis to determine if now is the time:
Figure that between now and summer, the price of an Athlon64 system with a given set of specs (RAM, HD, video card, etc.) will go down about US$500.
So, ask yourself this - is $500 over the next six months worth it?
If you are making money with this machine - you are a consultant, or do freelance work that earns money, will the roughly 40% speed improvement make you back that $500 in six months?
If you are a hobbist, will the "fun" of being one of the first people on the block with an Athlon64 be worth $500 over the next six months?
Me, I am looking at the Atlon 2000+ I'm typing this on, with the Radeon 7500, and saying "I'll wait". But that's me.
Your point about the overuse of antimicrobials like triclosan is correct, but I am not talking about antimicrobials - I am talking about "Nuke'm till they glow, shoot them in the dark, and and let $DEITY sort them out" antiseptics, like sodium hypoclorite, hydrogen peroxide, Lysol, and the like.
Nothing short of an extremophile will survive those to engender resistance.
CRON, or some other scheduling software, is your friend - set up a cron job to remind you to check your bill at T-2 days or so.
If you haven't received a mailing from them, you can check online and pay.
No matter what technology you choose for the displays, I would suggest having a box of cleaning wipes near the screen - preferably the kind that have Clorox or some other strong antiseptic in them.
I have to wonder if the problem of handwriting recognition is easier for languages that use an ideographic written form rather than an alphabetic form.
The biggest problem for somebody like me is the computer determining if I wrote "please" or "cheese" (yes, my handwriting is that bad). I would think that in an ideographic language it would be a lot easier for the system to sort through the known ideographs.