Bell South also raised their price on DSL, but in this case they were making the discount smaller for those who also were getting their phone service package. IE: the price was $49.99/mo or $40/mo IF you got their phone service package. Now the price is $45/mo for those getting the phone package, the base price is STILL $49.99. Guess the tie in was too popular, or the phone package was selling well enough on it's own.
Unless NetGear or Linksys comes up with a router that has a USB connection, I'd have to pay the ransom to get the Ethernet version of their modem to use the service. So I have telocity at the moment.
At least he didn't shut down the research. This action leaves open the posibility of extending the research if it proves out.
The reason for limiting the source of the cells has to do with the right to life. Destroying potential embryos (that aren't being implanted but could be) would be considered murder by many. Using already harvest cells changes nothing.
Maybe this country will yet survive this president, till we can actually elect the next one.
Actually open source, geeks, etc have been shown as the heros in some movies. The Matrix and the Net come to mind, also the recent movie (which bombed) that was loosly based on Microsoft and Gates (the name of which now escapes me). In fact Hollywood mostly portrays big corporations as the ultimate bad guys. Rollerball, Soylent Green, the Robocop series for example.
Well the view of the CA court may be correct as far as they are concerned. It's possible that the US Supreme court will hold up the ruling, IANAL and won't comment on if the CA courts overstepped their rights as far as state powers are concerned. The grounds of the lawsuit may overstep the first ammendment, and in that case a possible unfavorable result of the lawsuit trial could be overturned by the US supreme court. In fact I would not be surprised if the US supreme court waits to get involved until after this goes to trial in CA.
There is also the posibliity that in another state it would be possible to file a counter suit against the MPAA and company on grounds of the first ammendment, and perhaps slander. Hope is lawyer is on his toes.
If I owned one of those cd-cd copiers and I got one of those 'damaged' cd's, and that cd WASN'T labled as copy protected with a warning in clear labeling on it, and I copied it and the copy destroyed my speakers, Well that record company would be hearing from my lawyer about damages it owed me.
The difference here is that your cd drive was able to read a damaged disk, but the data wasn't damaged. Here the data is damaged!
Sonicly I think this copy protection scheme will suck. Audiphiles will claim they can hear the difference. Most probably classical recordings won't be protected since their intended audience won't stand for the distortion (not all cd players will handle it). Pop/Rock recordings will be the target of this.
It should be possible to build a solomn/reed correction program for use between a.wav data file and an mp3 encoder to defeat this. This type of program if targeted at ".wav" files would be a univeral filter sort of thing, and if so marked might legally pass under the legal radar (but IANAL).
Finally since Panasonic and JVC are selling CD recorders (with dual trays for copying and making custom cd's) what will happen to these machines? I bet they will add software to get around this with the RIAA's blessing (they rip internally, then burn the compiled data), though they may be forced to add the macro-shit to the burned disk!
There is a lot that can be done with technology. The timing of traffic signals could be monitored so that no one gets stopped for a red light when there are no cars waiting for a red signal going the opposing way. Why stop traffic for no reason at 3am?
As to the original thread, I would NEVER use a debit card. That's just a license to have someone put their hand in my pocket! I will ONLY accept a credit card or a charge card from my bank, they can keep their f!@$ing debit cards!
of those "internet appliances" that sold for pennies on the dollar for the hardware. Lots of you geeks were buying them (without the service) to hack them into linux boxes. The companies that made these gizmos soon wokeup and made it impossible to buy the box without the service. And rightly so! Tivo seems to be in the same boat. Now, I suppose they could make a stand-alone version that would do what most people like without the service, but would you pay %150-300 more for it? The whole thing is a package deal folks! Maybe they should have made that clearer in the begining. They are sure doing that now! Buy the lifetime sub and be done with it. (But I think Tivo ought to buy some insurance to pay off on the balance of anyone's lifetime sub if Tivo goes out of business within 20 months of anyone buying that sub).
OK it seems the GPL'ed code is in.DLL form. OK, they can do that, link closed source code with a GPL'ed DLL, that's legal. But did they modify the source of the GPL code to produce a.DLL? In that case they MUST release their modified.DLL code under the GPL. HOWEVER their application that uses the DLL code can STILL be closed source.
SO the question is did they release the source for any modifications they made to the GPL'ed code in the DLLs? If they did not they are in violation of the GPL since their modified DLLs MUST be released UNDER THE GPL. (or the GPLL any way). IMNAL but this is MHO of the thing.
Guess many of you don't get it. The over the air signals of dtv won't be encrypted, though that option will be available for closed broadcasts such as pay per view over cable. The TV sets however won't have a clear signal digital output. That channel, designed to connect to the digital input of a digital vcr will be encrypted, or at least have a don't copy signature in it. Digital VCRS will only record non-encrytped signals on their digital inputs, or those lacking the don't copy signature. Digital VCRs will be able to copy over the air signals IF they lack the don't copy signature. The idea is that you could view the signal, but not make a copy of it. Since set top boxes designed to allow analog tv's to receive digital signals must have a non encrypted output, you could copy this signal with an analog VCR (but there is nothing stopping the bastards from dumping Macrovision shit all over it!).
What would be a better thing to do (IMHO) would be to allow recording of ANY over the air signal, but with a time limit on the number of views allowed of the tape, and/or the number of copies that can be made. For example I could time shift an HBO movie to a digital vcr tape. I would not be able to make a digital copy of that tape, and the tape would be time stamped when the recording was made. The machine would also be instructed to re-time stamp the tape every time I viewed it. I would be allowed to view the tape for say only a 1 week period. That means that 1 week after I first viewed it the tape would become not viewable. Such a system would allow me to time shift a program, view it in a piecemeal manor (kids keep interrupting) or view it several times in a limited time frame (wife and I get to look at it at different times due to work schedules, etc). This would still preserve the content owners property since I don't own a copy, I just viewed it later than they broadcast it.
Oh BTW, how much do you wanna bet there won't be a digital version of TIVO? Only way to stop that is to have video on demand!
In one of the TNG movies (first contact?) Captain Picard was looking at a set of models of all the ships that had been named Enterprise. This included the tall wooden ship, the aircraft carier, the space shuttle, and one or two space ships before the USS Enterprise (NCC1701). So there is a precident for this I guess. But NCC1701 was the first STARSHIP. So this Enterprise can't be a STARSHIP.
Sounds a bit like Bob Trueax (not sure how to spell that) who designed Evil Knivel's sky cycle. Bob was an Ex-Nasa engineer who was designing his own space shuttle out of disgarded rocket parts. The TV show "Salvage One" (about a junkyard owner and an ex astronaut who went to the moon to collect old apollo 'junk') was based on him.
Once the fuel tank separates there will be different amounts of atmospheric drag on the fuel tank and the capsule. This will result in the fuel tank slowing down faster than the capsule. As a result the fuel tank will remain below the capsule. Thats why Allen Shepherd's redstone didn't hit him in the ass on re-entry. (It crashed into the ocean before the capsule landed, almost hitting a freighter!) Also, the article said that the fuel tank would parachute down, I assume it's chute's would deploy first.
There was an episode of Hawaii Five O where someone had a portable phone in an attache case. This was back in the 70's I think. The phone company did offer this stuff (and picture phone service too) back then, but cost was high and availabity limited.
We may not like monopolies but they serve a purpose. If there were many phone companies (and at one time there were) you might have needed several phones to call anyone. With only one system in place things work better. That's the idea of a public utility. In exchange for their monopoly the baby bells have to surrender to some regulation. That's the theory anyway.
So they have to provide some access to the last mile of copper for other network companies to provide DSL service. The system CAN work, it did seem to work here as I was quickly able to get DSL service from Telocity over Bell South's lines. I used to have flashcom over covad. That service took about the same amount of time to set up as telocity did.
So why did flashcom go bust? I'm probably not the only person to have NEVER received a bill from them for service. I may be one of the few who actually went out of their way to obtain a bill and pay for the service. (How many people would hang on hold for an hour to talk to the billing department?) I hope that Telocity will bill me, or charge my credit card for the service. If their accounts receivable department does their job they might have enough positive cash flow to survive. If you don't collect from your customers you will end up in bankruptcy court. Flashcom died because they set up their network before their business inferstructure. BASSACKWARDS way to run a business.
Why did Northpoint go bust? Maybe from doing business with Flashcomm and other clueless ISP's!
They might have survived if they sold their product directly. That appears to what Telocity is doing in most cases, though they also partner with some backbone providers in some areas. They were using northpoint to reach some of their customers, I think they are providing the network directly in my area over Bell South's wires.
Ok so paying Tivo for the service once you buy the gizmo sucks. Who will be the first to slap together some off the shelf hardware (TV tuner cards, TV out video card, removeable hard disk, DVDRW drive etc) and write some 'Tevo' software for Linux? Lets have an open source version posted on SourceForge. Oh and slash dot it too.
Unless a third party chipset for the PIV with DDR or SDRAM support is available the high price of RAMBUS memory is going to kill the PIV. Maybe Intel hasn't figured this out yet. My PIII mb uses the VIA chipset, I WOULD NOT buy an Intel cs mb because I don't want to be locked into rambus. PC133 memory is SO MUCH cheaper. Those in the know will opt for the new Athlon with DDR memory instead of the PIV. The best thing Intel could do would be to help VIA get out a PIV cs with ddr support, if they REALLY want to sell PIV's.
Oh, and I didn't mention the special case and PS you need for these chips too. Not that the Athlon doesn't need more power, but at least the same old case will work.
Read carefully, only Microsoft's own software will be limited with MP3. You can still go to mp3.com and download mp3 software for windows and use it on windows. The apps may have to be upgraded to work with the new os if some of the system calls have changed, but this will happen.
But before bitching, give the windows media format a chance. It actually doesn't sound bad. Also in some cases (actually many) it and the Real format sounds just as good as MP3 and stores in less space. I hate to admit this, but it's true.
I don't know if MS will let us rip our own cd's to windows media files, if they do I see no problems here (for the way I use this stuff anyway). But what about all those RIO players out there? Will they upgrade to MS format? Keep a copy of Bladeenc (http://bladeenc.mp3.no/) around just in case.
The plane may have been over international water, but the Chinese may claim a more of this space as their own. So they may believe the plane was over Chinese air space.
It was a spy mission. Almost like the U2 mission over Russia.
The problem is that simply saying 'Sorry' isn't enough. The language they probably want isn't something we are likely to use. Like admitting to a criminal act.
Guess we are going to slap import duties of a few hundred percent on all goods coming here from China real soon. Not exactly what the Chinese want, but their problem.
There was some talk on another thread about how long CD's would last. Audio CD's, and infact all cd's that are 'pressed' (IE not CD-R's and CD-RW's) should last a very long time. These disks are NOT subject to 'laser rot'. Laser rot was what happened to early 12" laser video disks. Laser disks are two sided, and are made in the same way as audio cd's in that the information is hot pressed onto the plastic, and then aluminum is vacuum deposted onto the plastic to make it reflective. Two of these disks are then glued together. What was happening was that the glue was attacking the aluminum and mosture was getting inbetween the disks. Better glue formulas have mostly solved this problem. Audio and computer CD's that are factory pressed are single sided. The aluminum is protected by a coating of varnish which serves as the label. As long as this is not scratched the aluminum layer will remain intact and the data can be read. It might be possible to restore a damaged disk by stripping off the varnish and aluminum and vacuum deposting a new layer of aluminum. Not something you can do at home though. DVD's consist of two or four disks sandwitched together, they might have laser rot problems if the glue isn't good....
CD-R's and CD-RW disks record via a dye that changes color and reflectivity with heat from the laser. This dye can destablise under light and heat. So keeping your CD-R's and CD-RW's in a dark cool place would be a good idea. Also the more they are 'played' the shorter their lifespan might be. So make a backup copy of any CD-R/RW you want to keep. CD-R's might be more stable than CD-RW's.
Do computers really get worn out? Well the amount of ram they have soon becomes not enough and due to the memory form factor on the MB, you can't add more, or it is too expensive to do so (30 pin simms vs 72 pins simms vs dimms vs rimms etc).
Hard disks become too small and their bearings are shot from spinning too much. They can be replaced, and cheaply too.
The video systems can't display enough resoulution anymore and the monitors need new CRT's. The monitors can be replaced but maybe the video card can't because the MB won't support the new cards (ISA vs PCI vs AGP etc).
So what really happens is that software and applications outgrow the HW, and the new HW is not compatible with the old.
I've read that after a long enough time the silicon in cpu's and rom's will 'migrate' and become disfunctional but I think we are talking centuries here. EPROM memory and maybe FLASH memory will suffer charge leakage over decades and loose their content. So eventually I guess computers WILL become worn out. How many IBM PC-1's are still out there? Apple II's?
Even Linux won't run (well) on original 386's, despite the claim to this. Well maybe as a router switch, but not much else. Even Linux has become more demanding of the hardware over the last 10 years. Still you can take a cast off Pentium I system, scrounge up some more memory and have a decent Linux box. I've done it. But I still prefer my new 866 PIII. Now Gnome starts up almost right away.
Some good points and some bad info. Upstream bandwidth is limited for technical reasons as well as political reasons. If you run a popular site you can generate lot's of constant traffic going upstream. OTHO it is hard to generate constant downstream traffic. Browsing the web, downloading some content here and there will NOT generate constant downstream traffic. It's possible for an ISP to resell the same T1 bandwith over and over (and get away with it) because on the average a typical group of customers will not be using all of the bandwidth available with their downstream traffic. HOWEVER if the same group of users all had servers running it would be possible for them to over use the bandwidth. It's a simple matter of one to many -vs- many to one.
Then there's Flashcom that NEVER sent me a bill. I called them several times and usually was on hold forever and gave up. When I finally talked to someone It was like pulling teeth to get any billing information. No wonder they went backrupt. I even had to send a CERTIFIED letter to get my closing balance out of them. When customers WANT to pay their bills and CANT there is something wrong.
I now have Telocity (was either them of Bellsouth who thinks Linux is a four letter word). We'll see how they handle their accounts. I've talked to a few people locally before getting them and most were happy with the service. They used to be known as CRAPOCITY around here, things now seem to be improved somewhat. Anyway my ISP needs are not as demanding as some. And it's nice to be able to now download an ISO image in under two hours!!
Slashdot Mirror
Bell South also raised their price on DSL, but in this case they were making the discount smaller for those who also were getting their phone service package. IE: the price was $49.99/mo or $40/mo IF you got their phone service package. Now the price is $45/mo for those getting the phone package, the base price is STILL $49.99. Guess the tie in was too popular, or the phone package was selling well enough on it's own.
Unless NetGear or Linksys comes up with a router that has a USB connection, I'd have to pay the ransom to get the Ethernet version of their modem to use the service. So I have telocity at the moment.
At least he didn't shut down the research. This action leaves open the posibility of extending the research if it proves out.
The reason for limiting the source of the cells has to do with the right to life. Destroying potential embryos (that aren't being implanted but could be) would be considered murder by many. Using already harvest cells changes nothing.
Maybe this country will yet survive this president, till we can actually elect the next one.
Actually open source, geeks, etc have been shown as the heros in some movies. The Matrix and the Net come to mind, also the recent movie (which bombed) that was loosly based on Microsoft and Gates (the name of which now escapes me). In fact Hollywood mostly portrays big corporations as the ultimate bad guys. Rollerball, Soylent Green, the Robocop series for example.
Well the view of the CA court may be correct as far as they are concerned. It's possible that the US Supreme court will hold up the ruling, IANAL and won't comment on if the CA courts overstepped their rights as far as state powers are concerned. The grounds of the lawsuit may overstep the first ammendment, and in that case a possible unfavorable result of the lawsuit trial could be overturned by the US supreme court. In fact I would not be surprised if the US supreme court waits to get involved until after this goes to trial in CA.
There is also the posibliity that in another state it would be possible to file a counter suit against the MPAA and company on grounds of the first ammendment, and perhaps slander. Hope is lawyer is on his toes.
If I owned one of those cd-cd copiers and I got one of those 'damaged' cd's, and that cd WASN'T labled as copy protected with a warning in clear labeling on it, and I copied it and the copy destroyed my speakers, Well that record company would be hearing from my lawyer about damages it owed me.
The difference here is that your cd drive was able to read a damaged disk, but the data wasn't damaged. Here the data is damaged!
.wav data file and an mp3 encoder to defeat this. This type of program if targeted at ".wav" files would be a univeral filter sort of thing, and if so marked might legally pass under the legal radar (but IANAL).
Sonicly I think this copy protection scheme will suck. Audiphiles will claim they can hear the difference. Most probably classical recordings won't be protected since their intended audience won't stand for the distortion (not all cd players will handle it). Pop/Rock recordings will be the target of this.
It should be possible to build a solomn/reed correction program for use between a
Finally since Panasonic and JVC are selling CD recorders (with dual trays for copying and making custom cd's) what will happen to these machines? I bet they will add software to get around this with the RIAA's blessing (they rip internally, then burn the compiled data), though they may be forced to add the macro-shit to the burned disk!
There is a lot that can be done with technology. The timing of traffic signals could be monitored so that no one gets stopped for a red light when there are no cars waiting for a red signal going the opposing way. Why stop traffic for no reason at 3am?
As to the original thread, I would NEVER use a debit card. That's just a license to have someone put their hand in my pocket! I will ONLY accept a credit card or a charge card from my bank, they can keep their f!@$ing debit cards!
of those "internet appliances" that sold for pennies on the dollar for the hardware. Lots of you geeks were buying them (without the service) to hack them into linux boxes. The companies that made these gizmos soon wokeup and made it impossible to buy the box without the service. And rightly so! Tivo seems to be in the same boat. Now, I suppose they could make a stand-alone version that would do what most people like without the service, but would you pay %150-300 more for it? The whole thing is a package deal folks! Maybe they should have made that clearer in the begining. They are sure doing that now! Buy the lifetime sub and be done with it. (But I think Tivo ought to buy some insurance to pay off on the balance of anyone's lifetime sub if Tivo goes out of business within 20 months of anyone buying that sub).
OK it seems the GPL'ed code is in .DLL form. OK, they can do that, link closed source code with a GPL'ed DLL, that's legal. But did they modify the source of the GPL code to produce a .DLL? In that case they MUST release their modified .DLL code under the GPL. HOWEVER their application that uses the DLL code can STILL be closed source.
SO the question is did they release the source for any modifications they made to the GPL'ed code in the DLLs? If they did not they are in violation of the GPL since their modified DLLs MUST be released UNDER THE GPL. (or the GPLL any way). IMNAL but this is MHO of the thing.
Guess many of you don't get it. The over the air signals of dtv won't be encrypted, though that option will be available for closed broadcasts such as pay per view over cable. The TV sets however won't have a clear signal digital output. That channel, designed to connect to the digital input of a digital vcr will be encrypted, or at least have a don't copy signature in it. Digital VCRS will only record non-encrytped signals on their digital inputs, or those lacking the don't copy signature. Digital VCRs will be able to copy over the air signals IF they lack the don't copy signature. The idea is that you could view the signal, but not make a copy of it. Since set top boxes designed to allow analog tv's to receive digital signals must have a non encrypted output, you could copy this signal with an analog VCR (but there is nothing stopping the bastards from dumping Macrovision shit all over it!).
What would be a better thing to do (IMHO) would be to allow recording of ANY over the air signal, but with a time limit on the number of views allowed of the tape, and/or the number of copies that can be made. For example I could time shift an HBO movie to a digital vcr tape. I would not be able to make a digital copy of that tape, and the tape would be time stamped when the recording was made. The machine would also be instructed to re-time stamp the tape every time I viewed it. I would be allowed to view the tape for say only a 1 week period. That means that 1 week after I first viewed it the tape would become not viewable. Such a system would allow me to time shift a program, view it in a piecemeal manor (kids keep interrupting) or view it several times in a limited time frame (wife and I get to look at it at different times due to work schedules, etc). This would still preserve the content owners property since I don't own a copy, I just viewed it later than they broadcast it.
Oh BTW, how much do you wanna bet there won't be a digital version of TIVO? Only way to stop that is to have video on demand!
In one of the TNG movies (first contact?) Captain Picard was looking at a set of models of all the ships that had been named Enterprise. This included the tall wooden ship, the aircraft carier, the space shuttle, and one or two space ships before the USS Enterprise (NCC1701). So there is a precident for this I guess. But NCC1701 was the first STARSHIP. So this Enterprise can't be a STARSHIP.
Sounds a bit like Bob Trueax (not sure how to spell that) who designed Evil Knivel's sky cycle. Bob was an Ex-Nasa engineer who was designing his own space shuttle out of disgarded rocket parts. The TV show "Salvage One" (about a junkyard owner and an ex astronaut who went to the moon to collect old apollo 'junk') was based on him.
Once the fuel tank separates there will be different amounts of atmospheric drag on the fuel tank and the capsule. This will result in the fuel tank slowing down faster than the capsule. As a result the fuel tank will remain below the capsule. Thats why Allen Shepherd's redstone didn't hit him in the ass on re-entry. (It crashed into the ocean before the capsule landed, almost hitting a freighter!) Also, the article said that the fuel tank would parachute down, I assume it's chute's would deploy first.
There was an episode of Hawaii Five O where someone had a portable phone in an attache case. This was back in the 70's I think. The phone company did offer this stuff (and picture phone service too) back then, but cost was high and availabity limited.
We may not like monopolies but they serve a purpose. If there were many phone companies (and at one time there were) you might have needed several phones to call anyone. With only one system in place things work better. That's the idea of a public utility. In exchange for their monopoly the baby bells have to surrender to some regulation. That's the theory anyway.
So they have to provide some access to the last mile of copper for other network companies to provide DSL service. The system CAN work, it did seem to work here as I was quickly able to get DSL service from Telocity over Bell South's lines. I used to have flashcom over covad. That service took about the same amount of time to set up as telocity did.
So why did flashcom go bust? I'm probably not the only person to have NEVER received a bill from them for service. I may be one of the few who actually went out of their way to obtain a bill and pay for the service. (How many people would hang on hold for an hour to talk to the billing department?) I hope that Telocity will bill me, or charge my credit card for the service. If their accounts receivable department does their job they might have enough positive cash flow to survive. If you don't collect from your customers you will end up in bankruptcy court. Flashcom died because they set up their network before their business inferstructure. BASSACKWARDS way to run a business.
Why did Northpoint go bust? Maybe from doing business with Flashcomm and other clueless ISP's!
They might have survived if they sold their product directly. That appears to what Telocity is doing in most cases, though they also partner with some backbone providers in some areas. They were using northpoint to reach some of their customers, I think they are providing the network directly in my area over Bell South's wires.
Ok so paying Tivo for the service once you buy the gizmo sucks. Who will be the first to slap together some off the shelf hardware (TV tuner cards, TV out video card, removeable hard disk, DVDRW drive etc) and write some 'Tevo' software for Linux? Lets have an open source version posted on SourceForge. Oh and slash dot it too.
Unless a third party chipset for the PIV with DDR or SDRAM support is available the high price of RAMBUS memory is going to kill the PIV. Maybe Intel hasn't figured this out yet. My PIII mb uses the VIA chipset, I WOULD NOT buy an Intel cs mb because I don't want to be locked into rambus. PC133 memory is SO MUCH cheaper. Those in the know will opt for the new Athlon with DDR memory instead of the PIV. The best thing Intel could do would be to help VIA get out a PIV cs with ddr support, if they REALLY want to sell PIV's.
Oh, and I didn't mention the special case and PS you need for these chips too. Not that the Athlon doesn't need more power, but at least the same old case will work.
Read carefully, only Microsoft's own software will be limited with MP3. You can still go to mp3.com and download mp3 software for windows and use it on windows. The apps may have to be upgraded to work with the new os if some of the system calls have changed, but this will happen.
But before bitching, give the windows media format a chance. It actually doesn't sound bad. Also in some cases (actually many) it and the Real format sounds just as good as MP3 and stores in less space. I hate to admit this, but it's true.
I don't know if MS will let us rip our own cd's to windows media files, if they do I see no problems here (for the way I use this stuff anyway). But what about all those RIO players out there? Will they upgrade to MS format? Keep a copy of Bladeenc (http://bladeenc.mp3.no/) around just in case.
The plane may have been over international water, but the Chinese may claim a more of this space as their own. So they may believe the plane was over Chinese air space.
It was a spy mission. Almost like the U2 mission over Russia.
The problem is that simply saying 'Sorry' isn't enough. The language they probably want isn't something we are likely to use. Like admitting to a criminal act.
Guess we are going to slap import duties of a few hundred percent on all goods coming here from China real soon. Not exactly what the Chinese want, but their problem.
There was some talk on another thread about how long CD's would last. Audio CD's, and infact all cd's that are 'pressed' (IE not CD-R's and CD-RW's) should last a very long time. These disks are NOT subject to 'laser rot'. Laser rot was what happened to early 12" laser video disks. Laser disks are two sided, and are made in the same way as audio cd's in that the information is hot pressed onto the plastic, and then aluminum is vacuum deposted onto the plastic to make it reflective. Two of these disks are then glued together. What was happening was that the glue was attacking the aluminum and mosture was getting inbetween the disks. Better glue formulas have mostly solved this problem. Audio and computer CD's that are factory pressed are single sided. The aluminum is protected by a coating of varnish which serves as the label. As long as this is not scratched the aluminum layer will remain intact and the data can be read. It might be possible to restore a damaged disk by stripping off the varnish and aluminum and vacuum deposting a new layer of aluminum. Not something you can do at home though. DVD's consist of two or four disks sandwitched together, they might have laser rot problems if the glue isn't good....
CD-R's and CD-RW disks record via a dye that changes color and reflectivity with heat from the laser. This dye can destablise under light and heat. So keeping your CD-R's and CD-RW's in a dark cool place would be a good idea. Also the more they are 'played' the shorter their lifespan might be. So make a backup copy of any CD-R/RW you want to keep. CD-R's might be more stable than CD-RW's.
Do computers really get worn out? Well the amount of ram they have soon becomes not enough and due to the memory form factor on the MB, you can't add more, or it is too expensive to do so (30 pin simms vs 72 pins simms vs dimms vs rimms etc).
Hard disks become too small and their bearings are shot from spinning too much. They can be replaced, and cheaply too.
The video systems can't display enough resoulution anymore and the monitors need new CRT's. The monitors can be replaced but maybe the video card can't because the MB won't support the new cards (ISA vs PCI vs AGP etc).
So what really happens is that software and applications outgrow the HW, and the new HW is not compatible with the old.
I've read that after a long enough time the silicon in cpu's and rom's will 'migrate' and become disfunctional but I think we are talking centuries here. EPROM memory and maybe FLASH memory will suffer charge leakage over decades and loose their content. So eventually I guess computers WILL become worn out. How many IBM PC-1's are still out there? Apple II's?
Even Linux won't run (well) on original 386's, despite the claim to this. Well maybe as a router switch, but not much else. Even Linux has become more demanding of the hardware over the last 10 years. Still you can take a cast off Pentium I system, scrounge up some more memory and have a decent Linux box. I've done it. But I still prefer my new 866 PIII. Now Gnome starts up almost right away.
I just tried the link. Well.... It showed me about 1000 feet futher than I am, and failed to show several providers that I KNOW are available.
I currently have Telocity. Wouldn't recommend them for a business (ADSL), but quite ok for the home, or a SMO.
Some good points and some bad info. Upstream bandwidth is limited for technical reasons as well as political reasons. If you run a popular site you can generate lot's of constant traffic going upstream. OTHO it is hard to generate constant downstream traffic. Browsing the web, downloading some content here and there will NOT generate constant downstream traffic. It's possible for an ISP to resell the same T1 bandwith over and over (and get away with it) because on the average a typical group of customers will not be using all of the bandwidth available with their downstream traffic. HOWEVER if the same group of users all had servers running it would be possible for them to over use the bandwidth. It's a simple matter of one to many -vs- many to one.
Now that is a funny story. I can just see him either getting TWO bills for service, or maybe (if he kept his mouth shut) not getting billed at all.
Sorta like calling down the block to a phone that was forwarded to Hong-Kong.
Then there's Flashcom that NEVER sent me a bill. I called them several times and usually was on hold forever and gave up. When I finally talked to someone It was like pulling teeth to get any billing information. No wonder they went backrupt. I even had to send a CERTIFIED letter to get my closing balance out of them. When customers WANT to pay their bills and CANT there is something wrong.
I now have Telocity (was either them of Bellsouth who thinks Linux is a four letter word). We'll see how they handle their accounts. I've talked to a few people locally before getting them and most were happy with the service. They used to be known as CRAPOCITY around here, things now seem to be improved somewhat. Anyway my ISP needs are not as demanding as some. And it's nice to be able to now download an ISO image in under two hours!!