I can speak from experience that Chinese no-name dual-SIM touchscreen phones are way better than their price point and reputation would suggest.
600RMB (~60 EUR) would get you a touchscreen phone from ChangHong with integrated stylus and character recognition (Chinese and Latin, but it's error prone), high resolution display (480*x?), two SIMs, music player, straight mini USB interface, driverless USB mass storage interface, 8GB integrated, up to 32gb via SDHC micro and a 2.5Mpixel camera. And the phone can be set to English (with some Engrish in the mix of course). Bluetooth yes, but no 3G, no WiFi.
An interesting feature is text-to-speech for names stored in the address book: it actually read the name of a caller in understandable English. Caller not in the adressbook with CLIP enabled had their numbers spelled aloud. In Chinese only of course:)
One feature I was very content with is the battery time: it has a 4000mAh battery - NiMH, not Li-Ion but still. A solid two weeks of battery power with medium amounts of talking time in between is more than impressive. Within the 600 RMB package was a second identical battery, a charging station, a 5V USB charger that could be substituted with any other 5V USB charger that exists. That way, you could always keep one battery charged and switch as soon as the other battery got low. Memory effect shmemory effect - you'll get a brandnew original battery for 5 EUR, so it's no problem charging the thing whenever you need to. Maybe Li-Ion is overrated and the situation where a memory effect would be noticeable isn't that common. I mean, who recharges their phone daily?
Measured in value-per-dollar, this thing was great. Downsides and eventual deal-breakers were some Engrish remains in the menu but the worst was some menus that were in Chinese only, no translation available. The games for example, but also some SMS sub-menus.
When (not if!) ChangHong gets around to translate the firmware with all submenus and iron out the last kinks, this will devastate the lower end cellphone market.
In that case, calculate SHA-512, SHA_256, MD5, MD4 and CRC32 and match them.
If hackers manage to produce a purposeful collision of two bitwise different files with the same checksums for 6 checksum algorithms, they are ready for Nobel and DARPA prize money;)
You could do the entire graphics processing server-side with only a video stream transferred to the client. This is less bandwidth-intensive than outsourcing the things that travel the PCIe bus on a traditional gaming system.
The cloud-gaming start-ups are trying to do precisely that, BTW,
And you would still have the problem of client-side programs looking for patterns in the image, which would cause cheaters insane amounts of work to continue their deeds.
This will work wonders in realistic shooters where people usually are behind cover heads down or shot at in an instant even without other people cheating.
At realistic distances for rifle engagements, the "I'm a head" texture in these cases is only half a pixel wide, so pattern detection will have no chance of determining it. The rest of the avatar texture is only a few pixels wide and camouflaged - a pattern matching is going to be hard and if it succeeds straight to DARPA price money.
With avatars behind covers or inside buildings, there's nothing to draw at all, so the client will never know someone is there until they actually try to shoot through the wall.
With server-side processing, no avatar can turn around faster than a human could command, so no insta-turns when someone creeps up the cheater's sniping position.
A client-side pattern matching algorithm can still help, but not by a huge amount. Since the aimbot cannot aim faster than a human could with server-side processing, it would just mimic a very quick shooter and not help anything at all in enemy prediction and tactics. When your opponent has enough time to aim, you're doing it wrong anyway.
What hardware "failure" looks like a wire grid and wallhack on screenshots? And why should I as a server admin care if you unknowingly or willfully used this bug?
What software "bugs" will have a detection signature like the latest aimbot? Which software bug will produce a registry entry and..\system32-fallout like a wallhack?
We know how likely an md5 hash collision is with hack X and legitimate program Y. Not very. With an increasing number of wallhacks and legitimate programs, we will see hash collisions sooner or later, but I'm not really convinced unless you have dozens of very very rare but innocent programs on your system that no one else has AND anyone else having them is also banned.
Think of the online arena like a dance club: you paid for entry and yet the bouncers can throw you out at the first hint of trouble. And all other guests are cheering and complimenting them for doing so. A few dimwits, idjits and griefers can just cause so much fallout in such a short time that even drastic and unwarranted measures are usually applauded by the audience.
Face it: bouncers and anti-cheat admins don't have the resources to assess every single case pondering over preponderance of evidence. It would twentyfold the cost of operating a dance club or game server and most customers are not willing not pay for a Constitution-class jury system.
If the choice is having "1 collateral damage for 50 cheaters banned" or "0 collateral damage for 25 cheaters banned" - or a huge increase in paralegal costs for the server admin, I will opt for the collateral damage. War is not fair anyway.
A cheater killing you instantly every time you come within a few lightyears of his avatar is still orders of magnitude worse than having a DVD in your DVD drive when you start the game.
It may be inconvenient, maybe even damaging the DVD drive, who knows. Replacing the DVD drive after 3 years and the DVD you possibly have to buy a second time when you got a minimal scratch that messes with the copy protection is just money. Unnecessary money, but you could factor it into the experience of playing an expensive game.
Cheaters on the other hand will ruin the game experience altogether. No amount of money will get you a balanced and fair Modern Warfare 2 right now. (Short of setting up your a LAN tournament on tightly secured computers you own and control)
One pirate is just lost income, who maybe would've never bought it full price anyway. One cheater can frustrate 63 paying customers per server all day long. As a paying customer, I would rather play with 63 pirates than with 63 other paying customers with one cheater among them.
I still hope they will squash cheaters because in my personal view they are scum comparable to child molesters. I would not want to have the "open platform" PC abandoned for games because of them.
It would be a shame to see more platform balkanization or a joypad-only environment for all the games. The moment a closed platform is exclusively established, running fees will come running, I know that. And I actually like to have one notebook for everything, gaming, working and internet. It's extremely convenient not to forget very portable.
A chemo for the cancer that is killing TF2? - I'm in:)
BF2 Project Reality does similar things, I think. Once in a while I see something flickering at the side of the screen for a single frame or so. I guess an aimbot would trigger and react instantly while a human player wouldn't even notice unless camp^w tactically waiting somewhere for a while.
This mod has been out for several years and they probably won't leave any visible graphics glitch in there if it was a mistake. The server code is not freely downloadable and obscurity is probably one of the reasons for it.
The police doesn't stop you from holding up a liquor store right now. The high-resolution 30fps CCTV system there won't stop you either. (A shotgun would, but that's a story for another thread.)
But with clear pictures of your face robbing a liquor store, you will have a police record. Do it a second time and you're on the wanted list. Do it a third time and they hunt you down IRL and no Pay-and-Spray will help you.
Security everywhere is hard to maintain, so it is sufficient to make sure that crime doesn't pay. Crimes that don't pay are not done.
In this sense, VAC could very well eradicate the cheaters altogether, if only with a lag of one month. Kids that download an aimbot that day will annoy the hell out of everyone else for a month and then they're gone permanently. People (=potential cheaters) will notice that and probably think thrice before downloading an aimbot themselves. People who still cheat then must be kiddies or junkies with no IQ, no idea of delayed gratification, no impulse control and not the faintest idea of self-discipline ("idjits") or actively gaining pleasure for hurting or impairing others ("griefers" = sadists). They can be banned all day long. Or slowly roasted on open pits, for all I care.
I could endure cheaters for a while if I knew they were never coming back, ever. If they have to buy a new copy of the game every time they get detected adds a good incentive for the game publisher to detect them with increasing accuracy and frequency. This means cheaters practically pay for their own detection and I like it that way.
Optical network components are still pretty expensive, 10Gbase-fiber-anything is above 500 bucks per component. I don't want to know how much the cable is.
It's usually impossible to saturate Gigabit ethernet with one fileserver or NAS box. SOHO use cases usually don't have more than that, so I guess Gigabit is sufficient for that.
With two faster SoHo NAS boxes we could approach the limits of Gigabit, though.
Case in point:
Reading large files from a cheap NAS box can approach a 25% utilization of Gigabit with Jumbo Frames of size 9000.
Equipment: NAS: 3-year old D-LINK 323 HDD: 2x 3-year old Samsung (read: cheap) 7200rpm in Raid1. Network: D-Link Gigabit switch, two runs of 0.5m and 30m Cat6 SSTP-PIMF cabling procured by the cheapest source on Ebay (20 bucks + shipping).
25% Gigabit top speed when reading with Jumbo Frame 9000, 18% with Jumbo 4000, 13% with standard frame size. Writing is always around 13% utilization, because of mirroring in a simple Raid1.
That is already overkill for most home uses, but full disk backups really benefit from the added bandwidth.
I had an old Athlon being the fileserver before, but with a similar Gigabit fabric it couldn't manage more than 8%, but still drew more than 100W of power.
With energy prices as they are here in ecologist Europe this was unaffordable, so I retired the thing in favor of a dedicated NAS box. An estimated 200 EUR in electricity just for the fileserver was more than I was willing to pay. Not having to run the Athlon system for a year paid the NAS box in full. That it's 3 times faster is only a bonus to that.
I don't know about your electricity prices, you probably don't have oodles of eco-taxes to pay for every kWh, but I guess an old Pentium/Athlon XP-class machine still makes for a quite large power bill...
Nope, flame retardant material can be required by law and building codes everywhere a "fixed installation" or an "invisible" installation is to be done.
Conduits that carry wires are usually carrying small amounts of air, there are usually not airtight and if they are, a lone rodent will ruin the airtightness in a few years. And conduits that have small air currents should have flame retardant material, especially if they have vertical sections. Hot air rising, chimney stack effect and that.
Better resistance to outside crosstalk, less interference with all the wireless (phones, cellphones, babyphones, microwaves, mind control rays etc) going around.
It's always better to have properly shielded cables. Cables well shielded against accepting outside EM radiation also *emit* less EM radiation. That would be beneficial for a number of reasons, including better cellphone reception and making the Men In Black work slightly harder, if you're conspiracy-minded.
The price difference is probably not worth the hassle of trying to determine the reason of low data transfer or lost packets.
For the same reason you should not use an elevator in case of fire, use flame retardant cabling if the conduits go vertical, please.
Reasons: - they get paid to roll around in dusty attics all day - they have experience, tools and testing equipment - you get someone to sue if things go wrong - you can concentrate on the things you cannot outsource and those tasks are piled up a mile high after purchasing a new house (they never end anyway for an able-bodied adult:)... - asbestos and similar things. The Pro will probably recognize it and react appropriately, you will think it's just dust and carry on. Other than that, let someone else breathe that stuff.
Why shouldn't he pull CAT7 now? Everyone with access to Ebay as supplier AND his own house as proof of wealth has no valid reason not to buy the best cables he can procure there. No, not Monster Cables, but cheap run-of-the-mill SSTP CAT7 (Screened/Foiled shielded Twisted Pair S/FTP).
Wiki-Grandma says Cat7 is a worldwide standard except for the USA, but that may or may not be true. Anyway, I think some webshop will sell them for a few bucks, just look for
SSTP (Screened-shielded Twisted Pair) PiMF (Pairs in Metal Foil)
For fixed installations in vertical ducts (like the GGGGP said he had), try to get a flame retardant cable. It may save you more than money.
If that fails or is actually much to expensive, buy a good Cat6.
The price difference between the Cat5, 6a/"e" and 7 are rapidly coming down and are not too big when compared to the cost of pulling several hundred meters of them through conduits and tubes and the prospect of having to pull a new cabling in a few years.
Always pull in new strings alongside the cable, though. Your house will probably survive long enough to see terabit ethernet and that will be over optical wire with a neutrino-shielded made of Unobtainium. Which Chinese webshops or Ebay will sell for a dime a dozen, by then, as usual.
Oh yes, it does work at some length, I can tell you.
Using a 15m flat ISDN cable and COTS SOHO equipment (Level One Fast Ethernet switch, nothing special) worked quite well at 100Mbps. I didn't measure anything and the receiving end was a DSL modem, so I cannot say how may billions of packets were lost in transmission. It lasted two years - until Gigabit switches hit the 50EUR mark, then I redid the wiring to use the new Gigabit NAS box fully, and because the ISDN cable running through the student's flat had become an eyesore:)
The computer I use is made entirely in China. It has Chinese characters inside out. I don't know what Lenovo pays their workers, it may be above national average being market leader and all that, but it's still a joke. If they had to rent an apartment on Fifth Avenue, that is.
But they rent a nice apartment between third and fourth ring road in Beijing, near the factory. 90sqm cost 400 to rent, 300.000 to buy, I know it's illogical, but I guess Chinese love to buy apartments instead of renting them. A full-fledged meal with all their family will set them back the equivalent of 80 USD for TEN people eating much.
So, the pay is low, but not a joke when the food and rent you pay is also quite low.
And what if I didn't bought their computer: they could pay no rent and not have dinner.
Macroeconomics: trade usually benefits all parties.
Without middle men, people from Beijing would not get the computer to me.
And I would suggest instead of assaulting other's peoples views before thinking or running wild with prejudices and stereotypes, take a basic course in macroeconomics to grasp external trade 101 and comparative price levels.
And then come up with a solution to improve the situation without a) compulsion/force b) cooperation between more than 3 international actors
And remember: the Renminbi / Yuan is not freely traded but the exchange rates set by The Party itself. That will explain a lot.
Not even would this violate the First Directive, it would also be either unethical, impractical or both.
Ok, we gag the Pope. It will not matter much, but I'm sick of hearing him be blamed for people having unprotected sex.
Then what? Nuke Mecca? Put neutering agents in the water supply, or finally put the Chem in Chemtrails?
We could also just close our borders, with walls mile high, if need be, and then do what WE like to, without letting the whole world direct our course.
After the second "evil" you should've know it was ironic.
Since in a fair and lawful society, wealth is a relatively good average of "talents, familiar bonds and the market's value of your work", it could possibly also be able to approximate the merit of a person. (In a fair and lawful society that keeps up competition of course)
My XP level is simply not high enough to believably contradict my own views:)
I subsumed that under "monarchy", since that is essentially what happens within less than a generation.
If the LA Police Department would stand down tomorrow, we would have territories marked and a showdown in the "Bloods vs. Crips" conflict. Less than 20 years later, stable boundaries will have been established or one sect eradicated. After that, it will be a mixture of a common monarchy and Führerstaat. Two generations later, it would become a regular monarchy. With rap music, of course.
Or they all starve to death when the welfare checks stop, I don't know.
A company that waits nine years between major upgrade rounds hopefully has the people with the skills and experience on retainer somewhere.
Nine years, half a generation of employees marched through them, changed positions, were promoted, left for other jobs, founded their own companies, left for a few months for their babies and all that.
The Internet Explorer 6 they are using is probably older than the very building they're sitting in, at least older than the most recent renovation. (I hope)
An upgrade every three years establishes a process that can be followed. An upgrade every nine years is re-inventing the wheel.
Slashdot Mirror
I can speak from experience that Chinese no-name dual-SIM touchscreen phones are way better than their price point and reputation would suggest.
600RMB (~60 EUR) would get you a touchscreen phone from ChangHong with integrated stylus and character recognition (Chinese and Latin, but it's error prone), high resolution display (480*x?), two SIMs, music player, straight mini USB interface, driverless USB mass storage interface, 8GB integrated, up to 32gb via SDHC micro and a 2.5Mpixel camera. And the phone can be set to English (with some Engrish in the mix of course). Bluetooth yes, but no 3G, no WiFi.
It looks like this (I don't know if that is the model I played with, it looks only vaguely similar)
http://img.alibaba.com/photo/263983686/ChangHong-F8-mobile-phone.jpg
An interesting feature is text-to-speech for names stored in the address book: it actually read the name of a caller in understandable English. Caller not in the adressbook with CLIP enabled had their numbers spelled aloud. In Chinese only of course :)
One feature I was very content with is the battery time: it has a 4000mAh battery - NiMH, not Li-Ion but still. A solid two weeks of battery power with medium amounts of talking time in between is more than impressive. Within the 600 RMB package was a second identical battery, a charging station, a 5V USB charger that could be substituted with any other 5V USB charger that exists. That way, you could always keep one battery charged and switch as soon as the other battery got low. Memory effect shmemory effect - you'll get a brandnew original battery for 5 EUR, so it's no problem charging the thing whenever you need to. Maybe Li-Ion is overrated and the situation where a memory effect would be noticeable isn't that common. I mean, who recharges their phone daily?
Measured in value-per-dollar, this thing was great. Downsides and eventual deal-breakers were some Engrish remains in the menu but the worst was some menus that were in Chinese only, no translation available. The games for example, but also some SMS sub-menus.
When (not if!) ChangHong gets around to translate the firmware with all submenus and iron out the last kinks, this will devastate the lower end cellphone market.
It's even better than the iPhone:
- two SIMs
- user-changeable battery
- unlocked
but here's my favorite:
- "drag and drop files through USB port of computer (No Software Required)"
No mandatory iTunes. Eat that, Steve!
In that case, calculate SHA-512, SHA_256, MD5, MD4 and CRC32 and match them.
If hackers manage to produce a purposeful collision of two bitwise different files with the same checksums for 6 checksum algorithms, they are ready for Nobel and DARPA prize money ;)
I could not understand your post over the sound of annoyed sheep. What were you saying?
Imagine the bouncers throw you out of the dance club you paid entry fees for.
10-15 bucks are possibly lost now.
Dare to sue?
I resent the notion of 90% of all players being scumbags and bottom feeders.
But if scumbags play the game without cheats like everyone else, I have nothing to object and they're no scumbags.
If you are able to shoot them easily, they're not cheating and that's fine.
You could do the entire graphics processing server-side with only a video stream transferred to the client. This is less bandwidth-intensive than outsourcing the things that travel the PCIe bus on a traditional gaming system.
The cloud-gaming start-ups are trying to do precisely that, BTW,
And you would still have the problem of client-side programs looking for patterns in the image, which would cause cheaters insane amounts of work to continue their deeds.
This will work wonders in realistic shooters where people usually are behind cover heads down or shot at in an instant even without other people cheating.
At realistic distances for rifle engagements, the "I'm a head" texture in these cases is only half a pixel wide, so pattern detection will have no chance of determining it. The rest of the avatar texture is only a few pixels wide and camouflaged - a pattern matching is going to be hard and if it succeeds straight to DARPA price money.
With avatars behind covers or inside buildings, there's nothing to draw at all, so the client will never know someone is there until they actually try to shoot through the wall.
With server-side processing, no avatar can turn around faster than a human could command, so no insta-turns when someone creeps up the cheater's sniping position.
A client-side pattern matching algorithm can still help, but not by a huge amount. Since the aimbot cannot aim faster than a human could with server-side processing, it would just mimic a very quick shooter and not help anything at all in enemy prediction and tactics. When your opponent has enough time to aim, you're doing it wrong anyway.
"Hardware failures and software bugs."
What hardware "failure" looks like a wire grid and wallhack on screenshots? And why should I as a server admin care if you unknowingly or willfully used this bug?
What software "bugs" will have a detection signature like the latest aimbot? Which software bug will produce a registry entry and ..\system32-fallout like a wallhack?
We know how likely an md5 hash collision is with hack X and legitimate program Y. Not very. With an increasing number of wallhacks and legitimate programs, we will see hash collisions sooner or later, but I'm not really convinced unless you have dozens of very very rare but innocent programs on your system that no one else has AND anyone else having them is also banned.
Think of the online arena like a dance club: you paid for entry and yet the bouncers can throw you out at the first hint of trouble. And all other guests are cheering and complimenting them for doing so. A few dimwits, idjits and griefers can just cause so much fallout in such a short time that even drastic and unwarranted measures are usually applauded by the audience.
Face it: bouncers and anti-cheat admins don't have the resources to assess every single case pondering over preponderance of evidence. It would twentyfold the cost of operating a dance club or game server and most customers are not willing not pay for a Constitution-class jury system.
If the choice is having "1 collateral damage for 50 cheaters banned" or "0 collateral damage for 25 cheaters banned" - or a huge increase in paralegal costs for the server admin, I will opt for the collateral damage. War is not fair anyway.
A cheater killing you instantly every time you come within a few lightyears of his avatar is still orders of magnitude worse than having a DVD in your DVD drive when you start the game.
It may be inconvenient, maybe even damaging the DVD drive, who knows. Replacing the DVD drive after 3 years and the DVD you possibly have to buy a second time when you got a minimal scratch that messes with the copy protection is just money. Unnecessary money, but you could factor it into the experience of playing an expensive game.
Cheaters on the other hand will ruin the game experience altogether. No amount of money will get you a balanced and fair Modern Warfare 2 right now. (Short of setting up your a LAN tournament on tightly secured computers you own and control)
One pirate is just lost income, who maybe would've never bought it full price anyway. One cheater can frustrate 63 paying customers per server all day long. As a paying customer, I would rather play with 63 pirates than with 63 other paying customers with one cheater among them.
Amen brother.
I still hope they will squash cheaters because in my personal view they are scum comparable to child molesters. I would not want to have the "open platform" PC abandoned for games because of them.
It would be a shame to see more platform balkanization or a joypad-only environment for all the games. The moment a closed platform is exclusively established, running fees will come running, I know that. And I actually like to have one notebook for everything, gaming, working and internet. It's extremely convenient not to forget very portable.
A chemo for the cancer that is killing TF2? - I'm in :)
BF2 Project Reality does similar things, I think. Once in a while I see something flickering at the side of the screen for a single frame or so. I guess an aimbot would trigger and react instantly while a human player wouldn't even notice unless camp^w tactically waiting somewhere for a while.
This mod has been out for several years and they probably won't leave any visible graphics glitch in there if it was a mistake. The server code is not freely downloadable and obscurity is probably one of the reasons for it.
Obvious troll is obvious, you're all posting in a troll thread. Don't feed BadAnalogyGuy, you know him, he always trolls.,
The police doesn't stop you from holding up a liquor store right now. The high-resolution 30fps CCTV system there won't stop you either. (A shotgun would, but that's a story for another thread.)
But with clear pictures of your face robbing a liquor store, you will have a police record. Do it a second time and you're on the wanted list. Do it a third time and they hunt you down IRL and no Pay-and-Spray will help you.
Security everywhere is hard to maintain, so it is sufficient to make sure that crime doesn't pay. Crimes that don't pay are not done.
In this sense, VAC could very well eradicate the cheaters altogether, if only with a lag of one month. Kids that download an aimbot that day will annoy the hell out of everyone else for a month and then they're gone permanently. People (=potential cheaters) will notice that and probably think thrice before downloading an aimbot themselves. People who still cheat then must be kiddies or junkies with no IQ, no idea of delayed gratification, no impulse control and not the faintest idea of self-discipline ("idjits") or actively gaining pleasure for hurting or impairing others ("griefers" = sadists). They can be banned all day long. Or slowly roasted on open pits, for all I care.
I could endure cheaters for a while if I knew they were never coming back, ever. If they have to buy a new copy of the game every time they get detected adds a good incentive for the game publisher to detect them with increasing accuracy and frequency. This means cheaters practically pay for their own detection and I like it that way.
Optical network components are still pretty expensive, 10Gbase-fiber-anything is above 500 bucks per component. I don't want to know how much the cable is.
It's usually impossible to saturate Gigabit ethernet with one fileserver or NAS box. SOHO use cases usually don't have more than that, so I guess Gigabit is sufficient for that.
With two faster SoHo NAS boxes we could approach the limits of Gigabit, though.
Case in point:
Reading large files from a cheap NAS box can approach a 25% utilization of Gigabit with Jumbo Frames of size 9000.
Equipment:
NAS: 3-year old D-LINK 323
HDD: 2x 3-year old Samsung (read: cheap) 7200rpm in Raid1.
Network: D-Link Gigabit switch, two runs of 0.5m and 30m Cat6 SSTP-PIMF cabling procured by the cheapest source on Ebay (20 bucks + shipping).
25% Gigabit top speed when reading with Jumbo Frame 9000, 18% with Jumbo 4000, 13% with standard frame size. Writing is always around 13% utilization, because of mirroring in a simple Raid1.
That is already overkill for most home uses, but full disk backups really benefit from the added bandwidth.
I had an old Athlon being the fileserver before, but with a similar Gigabit fabric it couldn't manage more than 8%, but still drew more than 100W of power.
With energy prices as they are here in ecologist Europe this was unaffordable, so I retired the thing in favor of a dedicated NAS box. An estimated 200 EUR in electricity just for the fileserver was more than I was willing to pay. Not having to run the Athlon system for a year paid the NAS box in full. That it's 3 times faster is only a bonus to that.
I don't know about your electricity prices, you probably don't have oodles of eco-taxes to pay for every kWh, but I guess an old Pentium/Athlon XP-class machine still makes for a quite large power bill...
Nope, flame retardant material can be required by law and building codes everywhere a "fixed installation" or an "invisible" installation is to be done.
Conduits that carry wires are usually carrying small amounts of air, there are usually not airtight and if they are, a lone rodent will ruin the airtightness in a few years. And conduits that have small air currents should have flame retardant material, especially if they have vertical sections. Hot air rising, chimney stack effect and that.
A normal English house has all the infrastructure visible to save on costs and be an eyesore to the tenants.
A normal house outside of England has conduits or at least a plaster drywall.
Better resistance to outside crosstalk, less interference with all the wireless (phones, cellphones, babyphones, microwaves, mind control rays etc) going around.
It's always better to have properly shielded cables. Cables well shielded against accepting outside EM radiation also *emit* less EM radiation. That would be beneficial for a number of reasons, including better cellphone reception and making the Men In Black work slightly harder, if you're conspiracy-minded.
The price difference is probably not worth the hassle of trying to determine the reason of low data transfer or lost packets.
For the same reason you should not use an elevator in case of fire, use flame retardant cabling if the conduits go vertical, please.
Yep. Always hire pros to do that.
Reasons: :)...
- they get paid to roll around in dusty attics all day
- they have experience, tools and testing equipment
- you get someone to sue if things go wrong
- you can concentrate on the things you cannot outsource and those tasks are piled up a mile high after purchasing a new house (they never end anyway for an able-bodied adult
- asbestos and similar things. The Pro will probably recognize it and react appropriately, you will think it's just dust and carry on. Other than that, let someone else breathe that stuff.
Why shouldn't he pull CAT7 now? Everyone with access to Ebay as supplier AND his own house as proof of wealth has no valid reason not to buy the best cables he can procure there. No, not Monster Cables, but cheap run-of-the-mill SSTP CAT7 (Screened/Foiled shielded Twisted Pair S/FTP).
Wiki-Grandma says Cat7 is a worldwide standard except for the USA, but that may or may not be true. Anyway, I think some webshop will sell them for a few bucks, just look for
SSTP (Screened-shielded Twisted Pair)
PiMF (Pairs in Metal Foil)
For fixed installations in vertical ducts (like the GGGGP said he had), try to get a flame retardant cable. It may save you more than money.
If that fails or is actually much to expensive, buy a good Cat6.
The price difference between the Cat5, 6a/"e" and 7 are rapidly coming down and are not too big when compared to the cost of pulling several hundred meters of them through conduits and tubes and the prospect of having to pull a new cabling in a few years.
Always pull in new strings alongside the cable, though. Your house will probably survive long enough to see terabit ethernet and that will be over optical wire with a neutrino-shielded made of Unobtainium. Which Chinese webshops or Ebay will sell for a dime a dozen, by then, as usual.
Oh yes, it does work at some length, I can tell you.
Using a 15m flat ISDN cable and COTS SOHO equipment (Level One Fast Ethernet switch, nothing special) worked quite well at 100Mbps. I didn't measure anything and the receiving end was a DSL modem, so I cannot say how may billions of packets were lost in transmission. It lasted two years - until Gigabit switches hit the 50EUR mark, then I redid the wiring to use the new Gigabit NAS box fully, and because the ISDN cable running through the student's flat had become an eyesore :)
Point by point:
The computer I use is made entirely in China. It has Chinese characters inside out. I don't know what Lenovo pays their workers, it may be above national average being market leader and all that, but it's still a joke. If they had to rent an apartment on Fifth Avenue, that is.
But they rent a nice apartment between third and fourth ring road in Beijing, near the factory. 90sqm cost 400 to rent, 300.000 to buy, I know it's illogical, but I guess Chinese love to buy apartments instead of renting them. A full-fledged meal with all their family will set them back the equivalent of 80 USD for TEN people eating much.
So, the pay is low, but not a joke when the food and rent you pay is also quite low.
And what if I didn't bought their computer: they could pay no rent and not have dinner.
Macroeconomics: trade usually benefits all parties.
Without middle men, people from Beijing would not get the computer to me.
And I would suggest instead of assaulting other's peoples views before thinking or running wild with prejudices and stereotypes, take a basic course in macroeconomics to grasp external trade 101 and comparative price levels.
And then come up with a solution to improve the situation without
a) compulsion/force
b) cooperation between more than 3 international actors
And remember: the Renminbi / Yuan is not freely traded but the exchange rates set by The Party itself. That will explain a lot.
Not even would this violate the First Directive, it would also be either unethical, impractical or both.
Ok, we gag the Pope. It will not matter much, but I'm sick of hearing him be blamed for people having unprotected sex.
Then what? Nuke Mecca? Put neutering agents in the water supply, or finally put the Chem in Chemtrails?
We could also just close our borders, with walls mile high, if need be, and then do what WE like to, without letting the whole world direct our course.
After the second "evil" you should've know it was ironic.
Since in a fair and lawful society, wealth is a relatively good average of "talents, familiar bonds and the market's value of your work", it could possibly also be able to approximate the merit of a person. (In a fair and lawful society that keeps up competition of course)
My XP level is simply not high enough to believably contradict my own views :)
I subsumed that under "monarchy", since that is essentially what happens within less than a generation.
If the LA Police Department would stand down tomorrow, we would have territories marked and a showdown in the "Bloods vs. Crips" conflict. Less than 20 years later, stable boundaries will have been established or one sect eradicated. After that, it will be a mixture of a common monarchy and Führerstaat. Two generations later, it would become a regular monarchy. With rap music, of course.
Or they all starve to death when the welfare checks stop, I don't know.
A company that waits nine years between major upgrade rounds hopefully has the people with the skills and experience on retainer somewhere.
Nine years, half a generation of employees marched through them, changed positions, were promoted, left for other jobs, founded their own companies, left for a few months for their babies and all that.
The Internet Explorer 6 they are using is probably older than the very building they're sitting in, at least older than the most recent renovation. (I hope)
An upgrade every three years establishes a process that can be followed. An upgrade every nine years is re-inventing the wheel.