I happen to knopw for a fact they did not upgrade ONE SINGLE MODEM, contrary to what they told the press.
Oh, really? Because I used to sit in on plenty of meetings and see plenty of reports with Matt Korn, Gerry, and everyone else who spent all day, every day getting Sprint, ANS, etc. to buy and install hundreds of thousands of modems that they knew would be useless in five years. Which led Sprint, ANS, etc. to bang down the doors of the hardware manufacturers until they cranked up their assembly lines, and then to overload the colo's with modems until Verizon, et al. were forced to build new central offices to handle the peak demand, which of course was now radically different from the peak-to-installed-base ratio that had worked to model telephone usage for the past 100 years. Thus resulting in slow dial tones for everyone, AOL user or not, until the entire national telephone infrastructure caught up to the demand. And then we could put in the modems.
So, yeah, that was my vantage point. I saw the numbers and heard it from the horse's mouth. Tell me, from your cube in, where, Ogden, Tucson, how did you "know for a fact" was was going on back in Dulles, and in colos around the country? I started in tech support myself, and even then, in the same building as the developers, there was plenty of "floor lore" - things we knew that simply had no basis in fact. We "knew for a fact" that Q-Link would load faster if you wrapped the drive in tinfoil. So when you say "know for a fact", I'm curious how you think you know it. And, honestly, refusing to help out by working on an overloaded phone queue (out of some principle you don't quite enunciate) doesn't make you look like the most cooperative, in-the-loop kinda guy. In my day, when one queue was overloaded, we all helped out, even if it meant password resets. Were you guys too good for that?
Yes, AOL made a hell of a lot of mistakes in those days, but lying to the public about our infrastructure was not one of them. If you're gonna accuse my buds of fabrication, you're gonna have to give some facts, and you're gonna want to sign a name.
The cd label said "FINAL FANTASY", but only until she selected a bolder typeface.
I'm trying to get the joke. Four mods already got the joke, but I don't get the joke. I haven't had enough coffee. I'm trying to picture how the kerning changes to form some dirty phrase as the text gets bolder. Ain't happening. Help.
One of the major trends right now in urban housing is for a developer to buy up a small section of older 1-story homes in a decent part of a downtown area, then knock those homes down and replace them with 4-story townhomes. Most of these townhomes are ~2,500 sq. ft. affairs, but the number of stairs has got to affect their ability to sell.
I was actually considering an elevator as I'm moving from a 2-story suburban house to a 5-story city rowhouse with high ceilings. In Boston, rowhouses are usually only 20 feet wide, and just Really Tall. And running up the stairs for five stories is just not that appealing, even when I'm in good shape.
The problem seems to be that most residential elevators are designed for disability access, not stair-replacement. I clocked myself walking up stairs at about 90 feet per minute; residential elevators seem to operate about 10-20fpm, or 30 for this pneumatic one. That doesn't count dwell time. I'm too impatient for that. I need a teleporter, or a bat pole.
Then the advertising is misleading. They say that, unlike a standard mechanical elevator, you don't need a mechanical room, headhouse, hoistway, etc. They say nothing about a break room.
The gender imbalance is clearly caused by the stereotypical male value images in the name "Firefox". Fire: Destruction, rage, consumption. Fox: a wily, powerful hunter.
Now rename it to "Feeling Sparrow", and you'll bag some chicks.
You read in a public bulletin board detailed instructions for taking your own money out of a bank that is closed on a Sunday and you get arrested???
Heyy.. that is a GREAT analogy. Let's follow it, step by step... at what point does that type of behavior cross the line and become *unethical* (not illegal)?
Let's assume in all these cases that your bank has no ATMs, but does use a PIN system. You have a balance of $5000, and you wish to withdraw $1000.
1. You go up to the teller window, and ask for the money. You enter your PIN, and the teller gives you the money.
2. You go up to the teller window, and ask for the money. You enter your PIN, and the teller gets your money, but then gets involved in a side conversation, and has meanwhile put the money down in front of the hole in the window. You take it and leave the bank.
3. For security reasons, the bank now requires you to call ahead for any withdrawal over $500. You call, and the manager tells you he will personally handle your transaction as a token of the bank's yadda yadda. You get there, and the manager is in a meeting, but the money is there in an envelope with your name on it on the corner of his desk. You fill out a withdrawal slip, write your PIN, sign it, and leave it on the desk, taking the money.
4. Same as 3, but this time there is simply a pile of cash unattended on the manager's desk, none of it labelled for you specifically. You count out $1000, fill out the slip, etc.
5. Same as 4, but the money is now in a closed (but unlocked) cash drawer in plain sight.
6. Unfortunately, you're late to the bank due to traffic. You get there at 5:30, and they've left for the night, but one window is open. It's the window to the manager's office, and he's got your cash set aside on his desk as in #3. Continue as with #3.
7. and 8. You're late, window's open, see #4 and #5.
9. It's Thursday at midnight, and you urgently need the cash to pay your bookie, but you know the bank's closed. However, yours is a weird bank; rather than pooling assets, they keep everyone's money separately in little bags, because that makes the analogy work better. You read on the Internet that the third window from the left is kept unlocked every night. You climb in, but there's a gate in front of the money bags that only opens when you enter a PIN (so tellers can't steal money). You enter your PIN, count out $1000 of your own money, leave the usual note, and take the money.
(This one is pretty much equivalent to the Harvard case, I believe. The rest is just because I'm having fun.)
10. Same as 9, but the money is pooled.
11, 12 and 13: Same as 9 and 10, but the money is in the manager's office, with your name, pooled, in the cash drawer.
The Russian mock Mars mission is a hoax perpetrated on the public by the Russian government - they really went to Mars! You can tell by the shadows in the photograph.
the (IPEAK) tests are by no means engineered to demonstrate the performance opportunities of RAID 0 configurations
See, now that's actually a more persuasive argument. You should write an article explaining why you think your workload is more representative of a power user's load than SR or AnandTech. Your current article doesn't do that. It really does read as "if you're gonna use RAID, you need lots of deep queues and sequential access, so we did us some multimedia!"
1. Anandtech and StorageReview benchmarked RAID 0 and found that, for desktop applications, RAID 0 is slightly slower than a single drive, because the things that RAID 0 is good at are not the things that desktops need.
2. So we changed the benchmarks to really need the things that RAID 0 is good at.
3. And now, RAID 0 improves things!
4. Therefore, the benchmarks in #1 were wrong.
Summary of the summary:
I'm looking for my keys under this lamppost because the light is better here.
Sennheiser makes three models of headphones, HD-580, HD-600, and HD-650 which are all essentially the same
Where does that info come from? The Sennheiser site says that the materials have been improved for the 600, not just the QC.
I think a better example of what you're talking about is the old single-sided vs. double-sided disks, or processor speeds today; samples that don't meet the top rating are "marked down" spec-wise.
Actually, the Pro Tools 192's aren't highly reguarded in the audio industry
Thanks for the info - I stand corrected. I knew the original ProTools converters were horrible, but I was under the impression that HD was considered decent, if not at the level of Myteks or even better Apogees.
In any case, the original poster was claiming that even "medium-quality" gear exhibited no audible differences, and he's clearly wrong.
Chum, if that "engineer" was able to tell the difference, it's because either one of those devices was faulty or poorly designed.
I know you're not the OP, but this seems like a somewhat circular argument. For any cite I can provide showing a double-blind difference between converters, you can claim the converters are faulty or poorly designed. FWIW, both ProTools HD and Mytek converters are considered reasonably high-end - in fact, Mytek is one of the boutique brands intended for mastering - and they've been used on many, many records. I can't speak to the individual units, of course.
If you're going to claim that nobody can hear the difference between proper converters, that claim has to be falsifiable. What, then, would make it false?
Good ADCs/DACs introduce far less distortion than the most freakishly "golden ears" audiophile could possibly hear.
You're kidding, right? Pro audio engineers can hear the difference between converters, and do every day. One quote from a message board:
"For those who want to verify double blind and statistically the difference between converters, this [PCABX] might be the ticket...I was able to pick out the Mytek 8-96 consistently over Protools 192 8/8 times."
How about VOIP providers? (Score:2, Interesting) by phr2 (545169) on Wednesday June 30, @05:04PM (#9575331) VOIP packets are temporarily stored in ram at the different routers they visit as they travel the network. Does that mean that VOIP providers can listen in on phone conversations? And what about the ECPA provision on unauthorized access to stored communications (Steve Jackson case)? Don't they apply here?
I'm fairly sure they do - we always assumed we were bound by ECPA at AOL. It wasn't even questioned.
I wonder if they just prosecuted the guy under the wrong law - wiretap instead of ECPA.
One thing I've found that helps before you block _all_ mail from them is block any thing that comes from their email address where the subject starts with "fw".
I actually tried that from the server side. Forwarding, on AOL, is an actual message construct, with metadata and everything. After a long battle, I finally convinced TPTB at AOL to let us prevent all e-mail forwarding chains longer than, say, 50 forwards from being sent. If you tried, it popped up a warning that chain letters were against the Terms of Service.. this was a personal fixation of mine, since "jay@aol.com" got not only chain letters intended for me but chain letters intended for ANYONE named Jay.
It didn't make even the tiniest dent. People just started replying w/quoting instead of forwarding once they hit the limit. Sigh.
George Kingsley Zipf discovered that if he ranked words in literary texts according to the number of times they appeared, a word's rank was roughly proportional to the inverse of the its frequency squared.
Huh? I should think that this "rank" would be exactly equal to its frequency, because that's how you're defining rank. Something is missing from this explanation.
Wrong, evilviper. You haven't had to download a plugin to use AOL Mail On The Web (nee NetMail) for at least five years - I forget the exact date of the cutover. Ever since then, it uses a purely server-based app. If you're going to tell someone to "get a brain" becase they contradict you, at least have the foresight to be right.
Slashdot Mirror
I happen to knopw for a fact they did not upgrade ONE SINGLE MODEM, contrary to what they told the press.
Oh, really? Because I used to sit in on plenty of meetings and see plenty of reports with Matt Korn, Gerry, and everyone else who spent all day, every day getting Sprint, ANS, etc. to buy and install hundreds of thousands of modems that they knew would be useless in five years. Which led Sprint, ANS, etc. to bang down the doors of the hardware manufacturers until they cranked up their assembly lines, and then to overload the colo's with modems until Verizon, et al. were forced to build new central offices to handle the peak demand, which of course was now radically different from the peak-to-installed-base ratio that had worked to model telephone usage for the past 100 years. Thus resulting in slow dial tones for everyone, AOL user or not, until the entire national telephone infrastructure caught up to the demand. And then we could put in the modems.
So, yeah, that was my vantage point. I saw the numbers and heard it from the horse's mouth. Tell me, from your cube in, where, Ogden, Tucson, how did you "know for a fact" was was going on back in Dulles, and in colos around the country? I started in tech support myself, and even then, in the same building as the developers, there was plenty of "floor lore" - things we knew that simply had no basis in fact. We "knew for a fact" that Q-Link would load faster if you wrapped the drive in tinfoil. So when you say "know for a fact", I'm curious how you think you know it. And, honestly, refusing to help out by working on an overloaded phone queue (out of some principle you don't quite enunciate) doesn't make you look like the most cooperative, in-the-loop kinda guy. In my day, when one queue was overloaded, we all helped out, even if it meant password resets. Were you guys too good for that?
Yes, AOL made a hell of a lot of mistakes in those days, but lying to the public about our infrastructure was not one of them. If you're gonna accuse my buds of fabrication, you're gonna have to give some facts, and you're gonna want to sign a name.
Jay "The Mail Guy" Levitt
AOL Employee, 1989-2001
In other news, these scientists appear to have some sort of contract with ASUS...
What is the major reason for people still sticking with VHS?
I have not researched this extensively, but I contend that it's because a VHS tape is the only thing that fits into their VCR.
The cd label said "FINAL FANTASY", but only until she selected a bolder typeface.
I'm trying to get the joke. Four mods already got the joke, but I don't get the joke. I haven't had enough coffee. I'm trying to picture how the kerning changes to form some dirty phrase as the text gets bolder. Ain't happening. Help.
What's a nowl?
One of the major trends right now in urban housing is for a developer to buy up a small section of older 1-story homes in a decent part of a downtown area, then knock those homes down and replace them with 4-story townhomes. Most of these townhomes are ~2,500 sq. ft. affairs, but the number of stairs has got to affect their ability to sell.
I was actually considering an elevator as I'm moving from a 2-story suburban house to a 5-story city rowhouse with high ceilings. In Boston, rowhouses are usually only 20 feet wide, and just Really Tall. And running up the stairs for five stories is just not that appealing, even when I'm in good shape.
The problem seems to be that most residential elevators are designed for disability access, not stair-replacement. I clocked myself walking up stairs at about 90 feet per minute; residential elevators seem to operate about 10-20fpm, or 30 for this pneumatic one. That doesn't count dwell time. I'm too impatient for that. I need a teleporter, or a bat pole.
Then the advertising is misleading. They say that, unlike a standard mechanical elevator, you don't need a mechanical room, headhouse, hoistway, etc. They say nothing about a break room.
The gender imbalance is clearly caused by the stereotypical male value images in the name "Firefox". Fire: Destruction, rage, consumption. Fox: a wily, powerful hunter.
Now rename it to "Feeling Sparrow", and you'll bag some chicks.
You read in a public bulletin board detailed instructions for taking your own money out of a bank that is closed on a Sunday and you get arrested???
Heyy.. that is a GREAT analogy. Let's follow it, step by step... at what point does that type of behavior cross the line and become *unethical* (not illegal)?
Let's assume in all these cases that your bank has no ATMs, but does use a PIN system. You have a balance of $5000, and you wish to withdraw $1000.
1. You go up to the teller window, and ask for the money. You enter your PIN, and the teller gives you the money.
2. You go up to the teller window, and ask for the money. You enter your PIN, and the teller gets your money, but then gets involved in a side conversation, and has meanwhile put the money down in front of the hole in the window. You take it and leave the bank.
3. For security reasons, the bank now requires you to call ahead for any withdrawal over $500. You call, and the manager tells you he will personally handle your transaction as a token of the bank's yadda yadda. You get there, and the manager is in a meeting, but the money is there in an envelope with your name on it on the corner of his desk. You fill out a withdrawal slip, write your PIN, sign it, and leave it on the desk, taking the money.
4. Same as 3, but this time there is simply a pile of cash unattended on the manager's desk, none of it labelled for you specifically. You count out $1000, fill out the slip, etc.
5. Same as 4, but the money is now in a closed (but unlocked) cash drawer in plain sight.
6. Unfortunately, you're late to the bank due to traffic. You get there at 5:30, and they've left for the night, but one window is open. It's the window to the manager's office, and he's got your cash set aside on his desk as in #3. Continue as with #3.
7. and 8. You're late, window's open, see #4 and #5.
9. It's Thursday at midnight, and you urgently need the cash to pay your bookie, but you know the bank's closed. However, yours is a weird bank; rather than pooling assets, they keep everyone's money separately in little bags, because that makes the analogy work better. You read on the Internet that the third window from the left is kept unlocked every night. You climb in, but there's a gate in front of the money bags that only opens when you enter a PIN (so tellers can't steal money). You enter your PIN, count out $1000 of your own money, leave the usual note, and take the money.
(This one is pretty much equivalent to the Harvard case, I believe. The rest is just because I'm having fun.)
10. Same as 9, but the money is pooled.
11, 12 and 13: Same as 9 and 10, but the money is in the manager's office, with your name, pooled, in the cash drawer.
The Russian mock Mars mission is a hoax perpetrated on the public by the Russian government - they really went to Mars! You can tell by the shadows in the photograph.
the (IPEAK) tests are by no means engineered to demonstrate the performance opportunities of RAID 0 configurations
See, now that's actually a more persuasive argument. You should write an article explaining why you think your workload is more representative of a power user's load than SR or AnandTech. Your current article doesn't do that. It really does read as "if you're gonna use RAID, you need lots of deep queues and sequential access, so we did us some multimedia!"
1. Anandtech and StorageReview benchmarked RAID 0 and found that, for desktop applications, RAID 0 is slightly slower than a single drive, because the things that RAID 0 is good at are not the things that desktops need.
2. So we changed the benchmarks to really need the things that RAID 0 is good at.
3. And now, RAID 0 improves things!
4. Therefore, the benchmarks in #1 were wrong.
Summary of the summary:
I'm looking for my keys under this lamppost because the light is better here.
not only do they have to reduce the wake of sonic booms (they shatter windows and suprise people)
Therefore, if we can train people to expect shattered windows, we have won half the battle.
Uh, no, I was talking about the judiciary.
The line between a public and private performance seems rather fuzzy, and fuzziness is rarely the catalyst for sane legislation.
You're right. They should set up a branch of the government to interpret the finer and more ambiguous points of laws.
Sennheiser makes three models of headphones, HD-580, HD-600, and HD-650 which are all essentially the same
Where does that info come from? The Sennheiser site says that the materials have been improved for the 600, not just the QC.
I think a better example of what you're talking about is the old single-sided vs. double-sided disks, or processor speeds today; samples that don't meet the top rating are "marked down" spec-wise.
Actually, the Pro Tools 192's aren't highly reguarded in the audio industry
Thanks for the info - I stand corrected. I knew the original ProTools converters were horrible, but I was under the impression that HD was considered decent, if not at the level of Myteks or even better Apogees.
In any case, the original poster was claiming that even "medium-quality" gear exhibited no audible differences, and he's clearly wrong.
Knowone is debating that the converters sound the same
Actually, that's exactly what Mprx was debating.
Chum, if that "engineer" was able to tell the difference, it's because either one of those devices was faulty or poorly designed.
I know you're not the OP, but this seems like a somewhat circular argument. For any cite I can provide showing a double-blind difference between converters, you can claim the converters are faulty or poorly designed. FWIW, both ProTools HD and Mytek converters are considered reasonably high-end - in fact, Mytek is one of the boutique brands intended for mastering - and they've been used on many, many records. I can't speak to the individual units, of course.
If you're going to claim that nobody can hear the difference between proper converters, that claim has to be falsifiable. What, then, would make it false?
Good ADCs/DACs introduce far less distortion than the most freakishly "golden ears" audiophile could possibly hear.
You're kidding, right? Pro audio engineers can hear the difference between converters, and do every day. One quote from a message board:
"For those who want to verify double blind and statistically the difference between converters, this [PCABX] might be the ticket...I was able to pick out the Mytek 8-96 consistently over Protools 192 8/8 times."
How about VOIP providers? (Score:2, Interesting)
by phr2 (545169) on Wednesday June 30, @05:04PM (#9575331)
VOIP packets are temporarily stored in ram at the different routers they visit as they travel the network. Does that mean that VOIP providers can listen in on phone conversations?
And what about the ECPA provision on unauthorized access to stored communications (Steve Jackson case)? Don't they apply here?
I'm fairly sure they do - we always assumed we were bound by ECPA at AOL. It wasn't even questioned.
I wonder if they just prosecuted the guy under the wrong law - wiretap instead of ECPA.
One thing I've found that helps before you block _all_ mail from them is block any thing that comes from their email address where the subject starts with "fw".
I actually tried that from the server side. Forwarding, on AOL, is an actual message construct, with metadata and everything. After a long battle, I finally convinced TPTB at AOL to let us prevent all e-mail forwarding chains longer than, say, 50 forwards from being sent. If you tried, it popped up a warning that chain letters were against the Terms of Service.. this was a personal fixation of mine, since "jay@aol.com" got not only chain letters intended for me but chain letters intended for ANYONE named Jay.
It didn't make even the tiniest dent. People just started replying w/quoting instead of forwarding once they hit the limit. Sigh.
Jay Levitt
ex-AOL Mail Guy
Ah hah! Gotcha. Thanks for the crisp explanation.
George Kingsley Zipf discovered that if he ranked words in literary texts according to the number of times they appeared, a word's rank was roughly proportional to the inverse of the its frequency squared.
Huh? I should think that this "rank" would be exactly equal to its frequency, because that's how you're defining rank. Something is missing from this explanation.
Wrong, evilviper. You haven't had to download a plugin to use AOL Mail On The Web (nee NetMail) for at least five years - I forget the exact date of the cutover. Ever since then, it uses a purely server-based app. If you're going to tell someone to "get a brain" becase they contradict you, at least have the foresight to be right.
Jay, the ex-AOL Mail Guy