This is common practice among radio amateurs (hams), although less passive - Meteor showers are when you break out the bigass VHF/UHF/even microwave transmitters.
I'm not sure if it was a success, but during last year's Leonids an attempt was made to set the distance record for terrestrial (i.e. not moonbounce) communications on 10 GHz. Something like MA to FL...
A friend of mine in high school told me about someone he knew who decided he just HAD to go straight to MS support when something wasn't working. He spent 2 hours (to the order of $99-199) on the phone with MS, and they weren't able to help him a bit.
He later mentioned the problem to my friend. My friend found the solution to the problem.
In 2 minutes.
FROM MICROSOFT'S OWN WEBSITE!
M$ support techs aren't even intelligent enough to search their own damn knowledgebase...
Moving into the parents' house is a bit of an inconvenience love-life-wise. (Read: No privacy)
On the other hand, it's much more socially acceptable in the current economy to be living with your parents than it usually is. I'd say 50% or more of my graduating class are living with their parents - I'm considered lucky that I have a job.
You might be able to try (as a recent college grad) for an internship. While internships sound like they should only be for students returning to school, it's becoming increasingly common to work as an intern even after graduation. If you do a good job, then you'll get hired full-time.
This is my situation. I was not totally sure when I applied for my current job whether or not I wanted to go to grad school immediately full-time or to get a job and start doing part-time grad school. The company I applied to was thinking about hiring me permanently, but in the end decided to hire me for the summer, with the possibility of continuing on.
It's November and I'm still here. I'm still officially on "Intern" status, but I no longer have an end date and my boss and his boss (up to the VP of Research) want to get my status upgraded ASAP. (Unfortunately, hiring is semi-frozen at the company). But having a semi-permanent internship with low pay is better than no job at all, and I have my foot in the door and a head start on my dream job once the economy picks up a bit and hiring becomes easier.
Note: I'm making far more than minimum wage, but still far less than the going salary for an EE.
And as the original poster said, even in jobs where "programming" might not be in the job description anywhere, even a bit of programming experience can be a BIG benefit. (I find myself whipping up a small Perl script every week or two.)
Also, in many of these cases, even if the experience they ask for IS possible, they won't get any responses with that kind of experience. So just try applying anyway.
"The problem is if you have been living the life style of someone who makes $60K..."
Maybe you should stop living beyond your means then?
Sell the house and buy a cheaper one.
Car payments got you down? Sell it, buy a cheaper one. You can get a good used car for $3000 or less. My '93 Dodge Spirit is worth less than $2000 now. It's old, it's high mileage, BUT IT RUNS and that's all that matters.
All this post amounts to is, "WAAH-WAAH! THE MARKET CORRECTED ITSELF AND I CAN'T KEEP UP MY OLD LIFESTYLE!"
I'm still doing VERY well with domain-based blocking. Probably gets 99%+ of all my spam - A total of 4 messages got by my filters today.
2 were virii (haven't gotten around to filtering them, going to start that soon, I've been getting some "Spoon River" virus a lot lately.) These are easy to filter, plenty of virus scanning filters out there.
1 was to a mailing list I'm subscribed to - Automatically whitelisted. I'm yelling at the listadmin to close the goddamn list to nonsubscribers now.
Only one was an actual spam from a new domain.
In addition to domain blocks, I recently implemented four new procmail rules. Three are for detecting fake Yahoo, Hotmail, and Netscape webmail mails (ones that don't originate from any of their servers.) No false positives yet, and no @yahoo.com, @msn.com, or @netscape.net spams have gotten through. The last rule detects malformed HTML-only messages without a charset - This catches 25% of my spam, no false positives.
"Another friend is on Verizon and said other then the shitty plan, he likes it."
You get what you pay for. Yes, their plans are the most expensive there are.
Is it worth the money? Yes. My phone works where no other provider's phones do. I've had nothing but pleasant dealings with their customer service. Call quality is excellent. And the cost is still reasonable - $40/month (including taxes) for 300 minutes of peak airtime and 4000 night/weekend minutes - More than enough for me.
Most other providers provide more minutes for less money - But I've heard nothing but complaints about most of them. (Look at T-Mobile, who offers the "most anytime minutes" but hasn't had a single favorable comment in this article.) So if you want service that actually works, you're going to have to pay for the higher quality. I live in Ithaca, NY for 4 years, and had cell service for 3 of those. Verizon (and its predecessors - I started as a Frontier Cellular customer and went through two mergers/buyouts) was the only game in town if you wanted service more than 2 miles outside of town.
AMPS - Analog mobile phone service. This still exists, but carriers are doing their damn hardest to phase it out. Every carrier in the US only provide AMPS as a fallback in areas they haven't upgraded to digital, which at this point are few and far between. (Mainly in extremely low-population-density areas)
D-AMPS - Often simply referred to as TDMA digital, although TDMA is too generic. Used by Cingular and AT&T. Most D-AMPS providers are moving to GSM. (Stupid move since that forces them into Yet Another Upgrade to UMTS since GSM is a dead-end technology with no seamless upgrade)
iDen - Only used by Nextel. Not much of a future seen for this protocol either.
GSM - Another TDMA format. T-Mobile/Voicestream was the only GSM provider in the country until recently, now AT&T and Cingular are upgrading. GPRS is the 2.5G extention to GSM.
CDMA - Split further into cdmaOne (2G) and cdma2000 (2.5G/3G). cdmaOne and cdma2000 are cross-compatible - a cdmaOne phone will work on a cdma2000 network and vice versa. Used by Verizon, Sprint, Qwest (small and being bought piece by piece by VZW).
CDMA has proven to be the winner in the USA - And its lead will continue once the GSM providers have to eat a full network replacement to provide 3G services (3G GSM is UMTS, a CDMA variant that is NOT cross-compatible in any way with GSM/GPRS, a problem that is causing financial troubles for many European carriers).
He was talking about taking a Sprint phone to Verizon, which uses the same technology (and has quite heavy phone overlap - The Kyocera 6035 for example).
Sprint subsidy-locks phones, Verizon does not. Why?
It has everything to do with how Sprint and Verizon sell phones. Sprint allows you to buy a phone from a large number of places (CompUSA, OfficeMax, etc.) without getting a contract. But that phone is pretty worthless without the service. Now if someone buys a Sprint phone and activates it on Verizon, Sprint is losing a lot of money.
Verizon, on the other hand, doesn't s-lock phones. That's because you can only buy a Verizon phone at a Verizon store or from Verizon's website (or by landline phone). As a result, you can ONLY get the discounted price on a new phone at contract signing. You can get a phone without a contract from Verizon, but they'll charge you a lot more. (For example, the Kyocera 6035 was $380 without a contract subsidy, $250 with subsidy.)
I don't believe Samsung has much in the way of GSM equipment, they're primarily a CDMA company, at least cellphone-wise. So I don't think this is the reason for the phone not being tested well.
Second: It's a pretty well-known fact that one of the reasons Sprint offers a lot more phones than Verizon is because it's a lot easier to get a phone past Sprint's QA testing than Verizon's. I've heard of a number of Sprint phones being "duds" compared to Verizons, whereas I've NEVER heard of any particular VZW phone being much worse than any other in terms of call quality.
FYI, this is the reason Verizon doesn't have any more recent Nokia phones than the 5185 - Nokia hasn't been able to get any other CDMA attempts past their QA testing since then.
PCS technology is no more advanced than the CDMA technology used by Verizon, Qwest, and Virgin Mobile (who is probably just reselling VZW or Sprint tower access). In fact, it's the same.
Now if you compare CDMA as used by Verizon and Sprint to GSM... That's a different story. CDMA wins hands-down, which is why 3G in Europe will be CDMA based. (Unfortunately for them, they don't have a seamless upgrade path, they have to all-out replace all phones/networks/buy new spectrum. On the other hand, cdmaOne and all of the subparts of CDMA2000 (1xRTT, 1xEV-DO, 1xEV-DV) are all backwards/forwards compatible with one another. A cdmaOne phone will work on a cdma2000 network and a cdma2000 phone will work with a cdmaOne-only site, the features offered will be the lowest common denominator.
All these people complaining about bad service should maybe examine their provider...
I have Verizon service and I have NEVER had signal or capacity issues except when indoors or inside my (shielded and unusually RF-noisy) car. I can use my Verizon phone at my *aunt's house*, which happens to be in the Middle of Nowhere, NY. It even operates in digital mode. Haven't tried AT&T, but no one with a Sprint, Cingular, or T-Mobile phone can get a signal on their network at my aunt's. (Cingular and Sprint phones MIGHT be able to get an analog fallback signal.)
In short, I'm a Verizon customer and have no complaints whatsoever about service quality.
Client-side filtering is NOT the solution
on
As the Spam Turns
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
While you may have broadband, not everyone does. Probably 50% or more of Internet users are still on dialup.
While you may only check your mail from one machine, not everyone does. And most people don't have the luxury of setting up an IMAP server so they can access their post-filtered mail remotely. (I do, but a cable modem connection isn't the most reliable, so I often find myself having to read raw unfiltered spam-laden mail.)
Also, wireless access to email from cell phones (either "dumb" WAP browsers or "smart" integrated PDA/phone solutions) is becoming more common. Have you tried downloading 100 messages over a 14.4 connection, only 5 of which weren't spam? Have you tried sifting through 100 subject lines on a cell phone screen. (It's painful even on a Palm PDA screen like my Kyocera 6035's). Thanks to the proliferation of spam in my inbox, I cannot even THINK about using my wonderful phone for email, something which it would normally be excellent for.
It doesn't matter how good client-side filtering is (mine is a manually maintained blocklist, plus a few rules to detect malformed HTML that is always spam and fake Yahoo/Hotmail/Netscape addresses not coming from their servers.), the client still must pay for bandwidth, and in the case of wireless users, per-minute download time at 14.4 (Or in 2.5G systems like Sprint Vision and Verizon Express Network, per-kilobyte.)
Simply put, it costs the user money to receive spam, therefore something needs to be done about it before it reaches them. Server-side blocking reduces user costs in:
a) Download time/bandwidth for the mail b) Storage costs on the ISP server that are passed on to the user in the form of higher fees.
These are both costs that cannot be negated with client-side filtering.
In addition to Logitech, Altec Lansing makes great speakers. I have an ACS48 set (no longer in production) and it's GREAT.
You will probably get more for your money with an external amp and normal home stereo speakers, as another poster suggested. A $5 1/8"-to-RCA adapter at Radio Shack will hook up your computer to the amp. This is what I did until I moved into an apartment where the area my computer was in didn't have space for my large speakers, at which point I bought the 48s. (The 48s actually sounded better in my case, but the original speakers were kinda crappy - They had originally had blown woofers and the replacements weren't matched to the cabinet, resulting in a muddy sound.)
But when my family went to the UK a number of years ago (Probably 8+ at this point...), the exchange rate was something like $2 US = 1 UK pound.
Despite the major difference in the value of each currency, prices for food (never looked at electronics) in the UK were the same in pounds and pence as they were in the US in dollars and cents. (i.e. if a McDonalds meal cost $3.99 US, it would be 3.99 UKP in Britain, despite the fact that 3.99 UKP was approx. $7.98 US - Food was on average TWICE as expensive in the UK because of the exchange rate)
All of their WinTV PCI products (Except the PVR ones) work under Linux and have for many (>5) years. I have one of their original Wincast/TV boards and it works beautifully under Linux (although I usually use Windows for TV because of DScaler, the deinterlacers available for Linux need a bit more polish.)
The PVR ones work somewhat - The drivers under Linux allow you to watch TV just like a non-PVR card, but don't support the onboard MPEG encoder yet.
The USB PVR model also works for composite video.
I fail to see how this article is anything but a Slashvertisement... Devices that offer higher quality than this USB1 piece of junk have been available for over 5 years. It's all about PCI or Firewire, USB (1.1 or 2.0) is inherently unsuited to video (It can't guarantee uninterrupted data, so there's nothing preventing dropouts.)
But I'm sure that within the spam industry some sellers have a better accuracy rep than others. So having a "cleaner" database will help you sell more databases.
While Betterly is one of the "lesser" spammers, the problem is that in this day in age, people are AFRAID to use opt-out/unsubscribe instructions.
Why?
Because using such instructions is the #1 way to get your email address propagated to more spammers. Anyone who knows anything about dealing with spam is that the #1 rule is not to do ANYTHING that could be used to validate your address. The only response to a spam that won't do more harm than good is a "User unavailable" or other similar delivery failure bounce message. Maybe Betterly actually removes people who wish to opt-out, but most spammers don't, and that's why all of this opt-in and opt-out bullshit will never work.
I have to agree... Manufacturer QC yo-yos so much these days that by the time one manufacturer has an established rep, their QC changes and people buy loads of drives they think are reliable that die in droves.
IBM used to have a stellar reputation for drives, and I would never buy from any other vendor. Now, IBM's name is mud and no one who has a clue is going to buy a Deathstar.
Likewise, it took me 4+ years before I heard enough testimony indicating that Maxtor and WD had shaped up their act before I would even think of buying another drive from either of them. (I now have a Maxtor 80G drive, and I'm pratying.)
Back when I was in high school administering my school's network ('97-98 is when I did most of my admin work there, as we got our 'net connection in erly '97), we had Western Digital 540M drives failing on a regular basis. Out of 20-30 PCs with WD 540s, we had an average of one failure a month. Our web server used 2 gig Maxtors. Over the course of 2 years, we had two of these units fail.
Supposedly WD and Maxtor are much better now... I hope so. I have a Maxtor and may be getting another 120G unit.
Seagate has always had a stellar reputation, especially their SCSI drives.
It's a duplexer. Although the main components of a duplexer (resonant cavities, as another poster mentioned) are essentially large thick-walled cans. (Except supercheap poor-man's-duplexers made from coffee cans - They exist but they are pretty high-loss)
These are usable in amateur applications because of the fact that repeaters transmit and receive on different frequencies. (Standard offset is 600 kHz in the 2 meter (144-148 MHz) band, 5 MHz in the 70 cm (440 MHz) band). 600 kHz is VERY close spacing at 144 MHz, which is why high-Q resonant cavities are needed, not L/C filters. They are needed because repeaters operate full-duplex (transmitting and receiving at the same time).
Such a thing doesn't exist for WLAN cards because of the fact WLAN devices transmit and receive on the same frequency (but not at the same time.) T/R switching is usually handled by diodes. (A diode, despite what a poster said, WILL block RF if biased properly. But to RF, it's bidirectional, either on both ways or off both ways, depending on the DC potential across the diode) Plus even in the "off" state, they'll leak a bit.
An isolator will allow RF to go in only one direction, while blocking RF going the other direction. These are expensive ($40-50 in quantities of 50+, probably more for one with coaxial connections).
Still, you can put all you want in the antenna feedline to make sure RF goes only one way - The receiver LO is going to leak out of the device housing. It'll be weak, but it'll be there. It'll be a CW signal, which will make it easier to detect despite being weak.
In RFMon mode, you don't need to take any measures to block RF going up the antenna feedline - The card will be stuck in receive mode with the transmitter shut down. Of course, the fact that your card is not transmitting means you can use a simple unidirectional preamp for receive rather than an expensive RF-sensing bidirectional amp. (These switch from receive to transmit when they sense RF coming from the transmitter).
The author mentions RFMON type sniffers in his article. While you can't detect the sniffer itself, it is easy to spoof such sniffers with bogus data that an RFMON sniffer can't validate (but an active sniffer can). Such data can be used to encourage the attacker to go active and hack right into a honeypot.
Slashdot Mirror
This is common practice among radio amateurs (hams), although less passive - Meteor showers are when you break out the bigass VHF/UHF/even microwave transmitters.
I'm not sure if it was a success, but during last year's Leonids an attempt was made to set the distance record for terrestrial (i.e. not moonbounce) communications on 10 GHz. Something like MA to FL...
If you have to call M$ $upport, you are *fucked*
A friend of mine in high school told me about someone he knew who decided he just HAD to go straight to MS support when something wasn't working. He spent 2 hours (to the order of $99-199) on the phone with MS, and they weren't able to help him a bit.
He later mentioned the problem to my friend. My friend found the solution to the problem.
In 2 minutes.
FROM MICROSOFT'S OWN WEBSITE!
M$ support techs aren't even intelligent enough to search their own damn knowledgebase...
The bomb was stored inside a soda machine at the Super Bowl.
Moving into the parents' house is a bit of an inconvenience love-life-wise. (Read: No privacy)
On the other hand, it's much more socially acceptable in the current economy to be living with your parents than it usually is. I'd say 50% or more of my graduating class are living with their parents - I'm considered lucky that I have a job.
You might be able to try (as a recent college grad) for an internship. While internships sound like they should only be for students returning to school, it's becoming increasingly common to work as an intern even after graduation. If you do a good job, then you'll get hired full-time.
This is my situation. I was not totally sure when I applied for my current job whether or not I wanted to go to grad school immediately full-time or to get a job and start doing part-time grad school. The company I applied to was thinking about hiring me permanently, but in the end decided to hire me for the summer, with the possibility of continuing on.
It's November and I'm still here. I'm still officially on "Intern" status, but I no longer have an end date and my boss and his boss (up to the VP of Research) want to get my status upgraded ASAP. (Unfortunately, hiring is semi-frozen at the company). But having a semi-permanent internship with low pay is better than no job at all, and I have my foot in the door and a head start on my dream job once the economy picks up a bit and hiring becomes easier.
Note: I'm making far more than minimum wage, but still far less than the going salary for an EE.
And as the original poster said, even in jobs where "programming" might not be in the job description anywhere, even a bit of programming experience can be a BIG benefit. (I find myself whipping up a small Perl script every week or two.)
Also, in many of these cases, even if the experience they ask for IS possible, they won't get any responses with that kind of experience. So just try applying anyway.
"The problem is if you have been living the life style of someone who makes $60K..."
Maybe you should stop living beyond your means then?
Sell the house and buy a cheaper one.
Car payments got you down? Sell it, buy a cheaper one. You can get a good used car for $3000 or less. My '93 Dodge Spirit is worth less than $2000 now. It's old, it's high mileage, BUT IT RUNS and that's all that matters.
All this post amounts to is, "WAAH-WAAH! THE MARKET CORRECTED ITSELF AND I CAN'T KEEP UP MY OLD LIFESTYLE!"
I'm still doing VERY well with domain-based blocking. Probably gets 99%+ of all my spam - A total of 4 messages got by my filters today.
2 were virii (haven't gotten around to filtering them, going to start that soon, I've been getting some "Spoon River" virus a lot lately.) These are easy to filter, plenty of virus scanning filters out there.
1 was to a mailing list I'm subscribed to - Automatically whitelisted. I'm yelling at the listadmin to close the goddamn list to nonsubscribers now.
Only one was an actual spam from a new domain.
In addition to domain blocks, I recently implemented four new procmail rules. Three are for detecting fake Yahoo, Hotmail, and Netscape webmail mails (ones that don't originate from any of their servers.) No false positives yet, and no @yahoo.com, @msn.com, or @netscape.net spams have gotten through. The last rule detects malformed HTML-only messages without a charset - This catches 25% of my spam, no false positives.
"Another friend is on Verizon and said other then the shitty plan, he likes it."
You get what you pay for. Yes, their plans are the most expensive there are.
Is it worth the money? Yes. My phone works where no other provider's phones do. I've had nothing but pleasant dealings with their customer service. Call quality is excellent. And the cost is still reasonable - $40/month (including taxes) for 300 minutes of peak airtime and 4000 night/weekend minutes - More than enough for me.
Most other providers provide more minutes for less money - But I've heard nothing but complaints about most of them. (Look at T-Mobile, who offers the "most anytime minutes" but hasn't had a single favorable comment in this article.) So if you want service that actually works, you're going to have to pay for the higher quality. I live in Ithaca, NY for 4 years, and had cell service for 3 of those. Verizon (and its predecessors - I started as a Frontier Cellular customer and went through two mergers/buyouts) was the only game in town if you wanted service more than 2 miles outside of town.
AMPS - Analog mobile phone service. This still exists, but carriers are doing their damn hardest to phase it out. Every carrier in the US only provide AMPS as a fallback in areas they haven't upgraded to digital, which at this point are few and far between. (Mainly in extremely low-population-density areas)
D-AMPS - Often simply referred to as TDMA digital, although TDMA is too generic. Used by Cingular and AT&T. Most D-AMPS providers are moving to GSM. (Stupid move since that forces them into Yet Another Upgrade to UMTS since GSM is a dead-end technology with no seamless upgrade)
iDen - Only used by Nextel. Not much of a future seen for this protocol either.
GSM - Another TDMA format. T-Mobile/Voicestream was the only GSM provider in the country until recently, now AT&T and Cingular are upgrading. GPRS is the 2.5G extention to GSM.
CDMA - Split further into cdmaOne (2G) and cdma2000 (2.5G/3G). cdmaOne and cdma2000 are cross-compatible - a cdmaOne phone will work on a cdma2000 network and vice versa. Used by Verizon, Sprint, Qwest (small and being bought piece by piece by VZW).
CDMA has proven to be the winner in the USA - And its lead will continue once the GSM providers have to eat a full network replacement to provide 3G services (3G GSM is UMTS, a CDMA variant that is NOT cross-compatible in any way with GSM/GPRS, a problem that is causing financial troubles for many European carriers).
It was definately the latter (Revenue protection)
He was talking about taking a Sprint phone to Verizon, which uses the same technology (and has quite heavy phone overlap - The Kyocera 6035 for example).
Sprint subsidy-locks phones, Verizon does not. Why?
It has everything to do with how Sprint and Verizon sell phones. Sprint allows you to buy a phone from a large number of places (CompUSA, OfficeMax, etc.) without getting a contract. But that phone is pretty worthless without the service. Now if someone buys a Sprint phone and activates it on Verizon, Sprint is losing a lot of money.
Verizon, on the other hand, doesn't s-lock phones. That's because you can only buy a Verizon phone at a Verizon store or from Verizon's website (or by landline phone). As a result, you can ONLY get the discounted price on a new phone at contract signing. You can get a phone without a contract from Verizon, but they'll charge you a lot more. (For example, the Kyocera 6035 was $380 without a contract subsidy, $250 with subsidy.)
First off:
I don't believe Samsung has much in the way of GSM equipment, they're primarily a CDMA company, at least cellphone-wise. So I don't think this is the reason for the phone not being tested well.
Second: It's a pretty well-known fact that one of the reasons Sprint offers a lot more phones than Verizon is because it's a lot easier to get a phone past Sprint's QA testing than Verizon's. I've heard of a number of Sprint phones being "duds" compared to Verizons, whereas I've NEVER heard of any particular VZW phone being much worse than any other in terms of call quality.
FYI, this is the reason Verizon doesn't have any more recent Nokia phones than the 5185 - Nokia hasn't been able to get any other CDMA attempts past their QA testing since then.
PCS technology is no more advanced than the CDMA technology used by Verizon, Qwest, and Virgin Mobile (who is probably just reselling VZW or Sprint tower access). In fact, it's the same.
Now if you compare CDMA as used by Verizon and Sprint to GSM... That's a different story. CDMA wins hands-down, which is why 3G in Europe will be CDMA based. (Unfortunately for them, they don't have a seamless upgrade path, they have to all-out replace all phones/networks/buy new spectrum. On the other hand, cdmaOne and all of the subparts of CDMA2000 (1xRTT, 1xEV-DO, 1xEV-DV) are all backwards/forwards compatible with one another. A cdmaOne phone will work on a cdma2000 network and a cdma2000 phone will work with a cdmaOne-only site, the features offered will be the lowest common denominator.
All these people complaining about bad service should maybe examine their provider...
I have Verizon service and I have NEVER had signal or capacity issues except when indoors or inside my (shielded and unusually RF-noisy) car. I can use my Verizon phone at my *aunt's house*, which happens to be in the Middle of Nowhere, NY. It even operates in digital mode. Haven't tried AT&T, but no one with a Sprint, Cingular, or T-Mobile phone can get a signal on their network at my aunt's. (Cingular and Sprint phones MIGHT be able to get an analog fallback signal.)
In short, I'm a Verizon customer and have no complaints whatsoever about service quality.
While you may have broadband, not everyone does. Probably 50% or more of Internet users are still on dialup.
While you may only check your mail from one machine, not everyone does. And most people don't have the luxury of setting up an IMAP server so they can access their post-filtered mail remotely. (I do, but a cable modem connection isn't the most reliable, so I often find myself having to read raw unfiltered spam-laden mail.)
Also, wireless access to email from cell phones (either "dumb" WAP browsers or "smart" integrated PDA/phone solutions) is becoming more common. Have you tried downloading 100 messages over a 14.4 connection, only 5 of which weren't spam? Have you tried sifting through 100 subject lines on a cell phone screen. (It's painful even on a Palm PDA screen like my Kyocera 6035's). Thanks to the proliferation of spam in my inbox, I cannot even THINK about using my wonderful phone for email, something which it would normally be excellent for.
It doesn't matter how good client-side filtering is (mine is a manually maintained blocklist, plus a few rules to detect malformed HTML that is always spam and fake Yahoo/Hotmail/Netscape addresses not coming from their servers.), the client still must pay for bandwidth, and in the case of wireless users, per-minute download time at 14.4 (Or in 2.5G systems like Sprint Vision and Verizon Express Network, per-kilobyte.)
Simply put, it costs the user money to receive spam, therefore something needs to be done about it before it reaches them. Server-side blocking reduces user costs in:
a) Download time/bandwidth for the mail
b) Storage costs on the ISP server that are passed on to the user in the form of higher fees.
These are both costs that cannot be negated with client-side filtering.
In addition to Logitech, Altec Lansing makes great speakers. I have an ACS48 set (no longer in production) and it's GREAT.
You will probably get more for your money with an external amp and normal home stereo speakers, as another poster suggested. A $5 1/8"-to-RCA adapter at Radio Shack will hook up your computer to the amp. This is what I did until I moved into an apartment where the area my computer was in didn't have space for my large speakers, at which point I bought the 48s. (The 48s actually sounded better in my case, but the original speakers were kinda crappy - They had originally had blown woofers and the replacements weren't matched to the cabinet, resulting in a muddy sound.)
But when my family went to the UK a number of years ago (Probably 8+ at this point...), the exchange rate was something like $2 US = 1 UK pound.
Despite the major difference in the value of each currency, prices for food (never looked at electronics) in the UK were the same in pounds and pence as they were in the US in dollars and cents. (i.e. if a McDonalds meal cost $3.99 US, it would be 3.99 UKP in Britain, despite the fact that 3.99 UKP was approx. $7.98 US - Food was on average TWICE as expensive in the UK because of the exchange rate)
Bringing new meaning to the product name...
Although given X-10's marketing strategy, I'm not sure if it is really a new meaning...
Hardware encoding = much better than raw video. But it still sucks, it's only MPEG1 not MPEG2, and MPEG1 isn't that hot.
This ripoff device can't come close to my 5-year-old Hauppauge WinCast/TV which I got for half the price back then.
All of their WinTV PCI products (Except the PVR ones) work under Linux and have for many (>5) years. I have one of their original Wincast/TV boards and it works beautifully under Linux (although I usually use Windows for TV because of DScaler, the deinterlacers available for Linux need a bit more polish.)
The PVR ones work somewhat - The drivers under Linux allow you to watch TV just like a non-PVR card, but don't support the onboard MPEG encoder yet.
The USB PVR model also works for composite video.
I fail to see how this article is anything but a Slashvertisement... Devices that offer higher quality than this USB1 piece of junk have been available for over 5 years. It's all about PCI or Firewire, USB (1.1 or 2.0) is inherently unsuited to video (It can't guarantee uninterrupted data, so there's nothing preventing dropouts.)
That they probably do.
But I'm sure that within the spam industry some sellers have a better accuracy rep than others. So having a "cleaner" database will help you sell more databases.
While Betterly is one of the "lesser" spammers, the problem is that in this day in age, people are AFRAID to use opt-out/unsubscribe instructions.
Why?
Because using such instructions is the #1 way to get your email address propagated to more spammers. Anyone who knows anything about dealing with spam is that the #1 rule is not to do ANYTHING that could be used to validate your address. The only response to a spam that won't do more harm than good is a "User unavailable" or other similar delivery failure bounce message. Maybe Betterly actually removes people who wish to opt-out, but most spammers don't, and that's why all of this opt-in and opt-out bullshit will never work.
I have to agree... Manufacturer QC yo-yos so much these days that by the time one manufacturer has an established rep, their QC changes and people buy loads of drives they think are reliable that die in droves.
IBM used to have a stellar reputation for drives, and I would never buy from any other vendor. Now, IBM's name is mud and no one who has a clue is going to buy a Deathstar.
Likewise, it took me 4+ years before I heard enough testimony indicating that Maxtor and WD had shaped up their act before I would even think of buying another drive from either of them. (I now have a Maxtor 80G drive, and I'm pratying.)
Back when I was in high school administering my school's network ('97-98 is when I did most of my admin work there, as we got our 'net connection in erly '97), we had Western Digital 540M drives failing on a regular basis. Out of 20-30 PCs with WD 540s, we had an average of one failure a month. Our web server used 2 gig Maxtors. Over the course of 2 years, we had two of these units fail.
Supposedly WD and Maxtor are much better now... I hope so. I have a Maxtor and may be getting another 120G unit.
Seagate has always had a stellar reputation, especially their SCSI drives.
It's a duplexer. Although the main components of a duplexer (resonant cavities, as another poster mentioned) are essentially large thick-walled cans. (Except supercheap poor-man's-duplexers made from coffee cans - They exist but they are pretty high-loss)
These are usable in amateur applications because of the fact that repeaters transmit and receive on different frequencies. (Standard offset is 600 kHz in the 2 meter (144-148 MHz) band, 5 MHz in the 70 cm (440 MHz) band). 600 kHz is VERY close spacing at 144 MHz, which is why high-Q resonant cavities are needed, not L/C filters. They are needed because repeaters operate full-duplex (transmitting and receiving at the same time).
Such a thing doesn't exist for WLAN cards because of the fact WLAN devices transmit and receive on the same frequency (but not at the same time.) T/R switching is usually handled by diodes. (A diode, despite what a poster said, WILL block RF if biased properly. But to RF, it's bidirectional, either on both ways or off both ways, depending on the DC potential across the diode) Plus even in the "off" state, they'll leak a bit.
An isolator will allow RF to go in only one direction, while blocking RF going the other direction. These are expensive ($40-50 in quantities of 50+, probably more for one with coaxial connections).
Still, you can put all you want in the antenna feedline to make sure RF goes only one way - The receiver LO is going to leak out of the device housing. It'll be weak, but it'll be there. It'll be a CW signal, which will make it easier to detect despite being weak.
In RFMon mode, you don't need to take any measures to block RF going up the antenna feedline - The card will be stuck in receive mode with the transmitter shut down. Of course, the fact that your card is not transmitting means you can use a simple unidirectional preamp for receive rather than an expensive RF-sensing bidirectional amp. (These switch from receive to transmit when they sense RF coming from the transmitter).
The author mentions RFMON type sniffers in his article. While you can't detect the sniffer itself, it is easy to spoof such sniffers with bogus data that an RFMON sniffer can't validate (but an active sniffer can). Such data can be used to encourage the attacker to go active and hack right into a honeypot.