Your magic phrase was "needs some form of label support to pay the atrocious bills of a studio that knows what it's doing." If you know what you're doing, you can build a computer-based studio for not too much money, and people who want to build studios to help other people record music can now do it for not too much money. (Here in San Francisco, the floor space for the studio now costs much more than the electronics:-) The expensive part is the "knows what they're doing." That's also getting cheaper, at least for the technical side - some of the other studio services, like providing backup musicians, may cost more.
What the label is providing is knowledge about how to sell music, and how to make music that sells, which is only partially related to how to make music that sounds good. But what they're really providing in return for your soul, first-born child, and ownership of your music is that they're running the business and hiring you to play music for them, like a bar owner hiring you to play for the evening, unlike the computer venture capitalist deal where the VC lends you money, owns much of the stock, but you run the business as well as making the product. Why can't you just buy studio time yourself? Theoretically you can, and if you can market your music successfully, cool. Studios are a lot less expensive than they used to be, but advertising is more expensive, but delivering product is less expensive. It's getting to be time to kick the chair out from under the traditional industry structure.
Thanks for finding out how much money they're getting. It's probably a good bit higher in 2001, and will be even higher in 2002, as CDR prices keep dropping, and the principle behind it is really obnoxious, but fundamentally it's not much money. If they stuck to that and didn't try to expand their control of everybody's intellectual property though buying politicians and DMCAs and SSSCAs and other abusive acts, I'd consider it worth 5 cents per US taxpayer to not only have the record companies off my back, but to have a well-defined legal right to make backup copies of music I've bought, MP3 copies to play in portable players, recordings of music from the radio, etc.
Note: the payments aren't per taxpayer, of course, they're per piece of recording medium, which is much less obnoxious, since it's not taxing people who aren't recording anything. So if it bothers you that the tax covers media that you record non-audio material on, go get yourself a copy of Morpheus and download some Metallica tunes.
I suppose it might randomly overload your speakers, but if your equipment is decent it'll have some kind of anti-self-destruction limitations built in. The copy protection dreck just gives you lots of bad bits which a computer player will reject and an audio player will error-correct (unless, of course, somebody writes different error-correction software for the computer-based players.)
Typical prices at Fry's are about 15 cents for el-cheapo CDRs on sale, and maybe 50 cents for name-brand not-on-sale. So if that's 50 cents Canadian, that's still got room for 22 cents tax, though only for the cheap brands.
I don't know if this technology has problems with it, but another classic telephony problem is crosstalk - signals leaking from one wire to another one nearby. That's one of the reasons for using good twisted-pair cabling, which reduces it.
I'm glad you mentioned Netscape in the body of your message. It always struck me as hypocritical that Netscape, who became a huge company by giving away their browser for free and transformed industry business models in the process, was one of the prime attackers of Microsoft because those Bad Bad Monopolists were giving away their browser for free.
Ignore the fact that they catalyzed the web market (either as Netscape or as their preceding life as the Mosaic free university-ware browser) by making it easy to view pictures and text on the same page, as opposed to the previous ftp-like interfaces. And those Bad Bad Netscape Monopolists destroyed the chances for REAL HYPERTEXT which the Xanadu project was planning to ship Real Soon (after a mere 25 years of development:-).
Also, people *do* make superior browsers. The World Wide Web Consortium W3.org has done a variety of browsers that are cleaner, smaller, and more correct than the big MS and NetscapeZilla product suites. Opera has been lured away into bloatware by the evils of flashiness and feature creep, so they're no longer the lean, mean, fits-on-a-floppy browser that their wonderful early versions were, but they're still a lot smaller than their major competitors. And there are bunches of EMACS-based browser hacks, which were the original integrated browser/mailtool/newsreader/wordprocessor suite. (It's no longer "Eight Megabytes", but it's still "And Continually Swapping".:-)
Sigh. I hate software patents:-) Not sure if they wrote it broadly enough to cover this.
The interesting thing about Passfaces ( other than the idea that a small number of face choices is as secure as anything but a PIN-length password), is that most people can recognize faces well but can't describe them verbally well enough to reveal their passfaces to anybody else, even under coercion or court order. Rough descriptions ("it's a guy with a beard" "it's a woman with short hair") are easy, but they shuffle the faces around enough that unless the Bad Guys are showing you the actual pictures, you can't give a usefully repeatable description.
Not BackHoe-Proof - Two cuts and you're off-net
on
Escape from Data Alcatraz
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
There are some kind of applications that work fine in isolation, and if this is one of them, cool. But most real-world businesses need to be connected to the rest of the world - either the Internet, or privatge networks (e.g. bank data centers talking to ATMs). The article doesn't mention physically redundant communications, though I assume they probably did use a fiber ring of some sort, which means it takes *two* backhoe hits before they're off the net and not just one. But if they're this paranoid, and not just hyping themselves, they need some radio or satellite connectivity, enough voice diversity (or cell phones) so they can talk if their phone connection gets cut, and ideally geographical diversity so that if something does go seriously wrong (flood, earthquake, etc.) they can run from their other location.
OK, so they built the Tardis, and occasionally invest in some styrofoam rocks or cardboard monster robots, but it's nice to have a show where they don't let special effects budget drive *too* much of the plot:-)
Sure, these days just about everybody uses firewalls, so the only parts appearing to the outside world are a few addresses for the outside of the firewall (one or more, depending on geographical diversity, backup needs, etc.) You can use RFC1918 internally, but if you're mostly connecting to the outside, sometimes it does make sense to use registered addresses, especially if you think you'll change from using that frame relay network to VPNs or some other architecture in a year or two, or if you think you might merge with another company.
Whenever I use 10.x addresses, I never use 10.1.*.* - 10.10.*.*, and usually pick a random number to subnet under (10.RAND.*.*) so that if I have to merge it with another numbering system, there's less chance of collisions, renumbering, NAT, etc.
Sure, the manufacturers desperately want customers to pay $1500-2000 for overpowered machines, and make sure the trade rag reviews talk about "Top 10 Budget PCs", all of which cost >$998, as well as cluelessly reviewing "Top 10 Notebook Machines" all over 4 pounds (so you've got the really good screens.) Of course, the last time I went outside my corporate purchasing guidelines and bought $500 boxes for my lab instead of the approved $1500 machines, half of them were dead in a year, but I had been able to buy three times as many of them:-) But realistically, that's WAY TOO MUCH MONEY. Disk drives cost about $100-200 for really big drives, gigabytes of RAM cost under $100, CD-R burners cost $75, and gigahertz motherboards cost $99 with the CPU. The only reason you need a new screen is because the last PC you had used a Microsoft-mindset-limited 1024x768 screen instead of 1600x1200, so you need a new $50-75 video board to finally see more text on a screen than my Sun 3/60 had, but your existing CRT will probably do 1280x1024, and unless you're using your PC as a VOIP phone, the only reason to spend more than $10 on audio features is to use the thing to play music while you're gaming\\\\\working.
Yes, you could get a $1500 desktop machine if you want to spend $1000 on a really good flat-screen display - and if this were still the Dot-Com-Boom of 1997 instead of the Dot-Com-Bust of 2001 you'd do it in an instant, but this year, you'd only spend that because it's really nice, not because it's actually enhancing your ability to do work.
The real must-have component for your desk-top machine - it's the $25 plastic slide-out disk drive drawer, so you can upgrade that 20GB drive to an 80GB drive without disassembling the box. (And of course the CD-R, because 650MB CD-Rs are cheaper than floppies these days.)
Hear, hear. For personal use (since I'm not a gamer, and don't use my PC as a substitute for a television:-), I don't need multi-GHz processing, especially if I'm not wasting it on patronizing bloatware user interfaces, and I don't need a Beowulf cluster in my garage. For business applications, there are obvious applications like encryption for web servers (lots of SSL sessions, though custom accelerator boards (or less-custom DSPs) are often worthwhile ways to speed that up) or database searching - but that one parallelizes well, and the real performance problems are usually in how you handle the disk drives. The old Teradata Database Engines had up to 432 processors, each with their own disk drives, and a funky fast bus connecting them - the master processors would split up database queries into slices that each little CPU could go search on and then collect the results back together. You could build similar things today using PCs and either chains of fast Ethernet - Beowulf is designed for more general-purpose applications, but much of the philosophy is reusable, and the techniques for splitting up queries can probably be adapted easily enough. Inktomi/b> and similar highly parallelizable indexing and search engines are another point in the loosely-coupled-processing space, though obviously you're not going to run a massive web-crawler in your garage behind a little DSL connection - the processing needs to balance the network bandwidth.
Arbitrary-Speaker Large-Vocabulary Connected-Speech recognition may still be far off, but One-Speaker-With-Training Large-Vocabulary recognition is works pretty well, as long as you've got enough resources available to store the data with all the different models of the speech. Laptops and desktops have enough RAM, disk, and horsepower to handle the job, at least for basic text dictation activities, and PDA's currently don't - but that's a near-term change. You need a real memory management platform instead of the hokey stuff PalmOS provides, and probably one or two more generations of Speed*BatteryLife from now (the earlier versions of IBM and Dragon that approached usable general-purpose vocabularies generally wanted at least 150-200MHz and 150-200 MB disk, which is a different storage/price ratio from current PDAs, but you can do the disk-on-compact-flash stuff, or they could probably produce it cheaply enough in ROM.) And Text-To-Speech works intellegebly well also.
That's enough to change how you interact with a PDA - instead of a screen interface with handwriting input, you can do an earphone/mike interface, voice input, voice output for many things, though possibly a screen as well. Obviously you'd want to integrate it with a cellphone and voicemail. E-Books are probably way too annoying when read through most common text-to-speech systems, but perhaps the new AT&T Labs Natural Voice stuff is good enough.
Some of that can probably be done with much lower-end speech-recognition, and possibly with speaker-independent. The Sprint voice-dialed cellphone is a cute trick - the memory and speech recognition parts can live in the server side of the system, but since the system knows it's *your* cellphone, it only needs to look up your few dozen phone numbers, rather than having to recognize across their entire subscriber bases' set of "Mom", "Home", "Work" voice patterns.
They've been hyping this for a couple of years. Doesn't mean they've actually got the technology to do it, just the technology to hype it. There's a wide range of possible motivations they could have, including
They're serious.... Least likly possibility:-)
They know that newspapers will bite, because it's good-sounding hype.
They're pro-surveillance types, seeing how many people will bite and what parts sound most sellable.
They're actually against this stuff, and think publicizing it will spook people.
It's a good media hack even if they're not serious. If enough people get really annoyed, it gets repeated a lot:-)
Newer apartments are often wired so that the building management can offer telecom services, and there are companies in the business of operating telecom services for Multiple Tenant Unit (MTU) apartments and businesses. For residential use, one model that's becoming common, and is easy to retrofit into almost anything post-70s, is to use cable modem technology to the building's head end, and instead of the cable TV company's cable-modem partner offering service, the building does it instead, usually with some obnoxious pricing and underpowered service (e.g. a T1 feeding the building with a few hundred tenants, and downloads capped to ~400kbps). In business MTU environments, sometimes the building management makes a deal with a telco, sometimes with a CLEC, but in any case they may drop fiber to the building and sell various amounts of services to the companies there. For those of us in the ISP/telco business, they're a really interesting customer segment - individual MTUs are bigger than retail but smaller than wholesale, and some large building management companies register themselves as CLECs to take advantage of regulatory situations and make more money on the telecom services.
At somewhat the opposite ends of the spectrum, friends of mine who lived in an apartment building Palo Alto a decade or so ago wired it for Ethernet (Thinwire, aka 10base2, aka Cheapernet.) They had a startup company with offices in one apartment and several of them living in various apartments in the building, so telecommuting was even more convenient. I think they had a T1 feeding the business at the beginning, and after the business moved out to a Real Apartment they shared some kind of fractional T connection among the interested tenants.
The first network wired house I looked at when househunting achieved its status in about the most minimal form possible - there were two adjacent rooms with 10base2 jacks on the wall connected by about 6 inches of cable:-)
Agreed - that's not really the right kind of property to convert to apartments - they're designed with lots of electricity and telcom cable feeds, but not made with lots of entrances, and they've got WAY more network bandwidth than anybody needs at home. What you really want (if you like living in a big city), is to be in an apartment building near the telco hotel, so you can get some cheap network access from some non-telco customer willing to put radio or infrared on the roof. Newer apartment buildings can be wired; older ones can be wireless (and the new 802.11a 55+Mbps wireless are enough faster if 10Mbps isn't enough.)
In addition to AirFiber, there's also Terabeam doing building-to-building optical technology. They're in the 100Mbps - 1Gbps speed ranges, with distances of 1km if you don't have fog, or 500 meters if you get fog (they're based in Seattle, so they've had plenty of weather to get real experience with:-) I think there are also a variety of other equipment makers.
Close, but nobody smokes cigars any more.
The most popular stuff seems to be 1200 baud on 2-meter, which is line-of-sight plus repeaters, though there's some 300 baud HF stuff that has more chance of going city-to-city, and some fancier 9600 baud stuff.
TNC (terminal Node Controller)
A TNC contains a modem, a computer processor (CPU), and the associated circuitry required to convert communications between your computer (RS-232) and the packet radio protocol in use. A TNC assembles a packet from data received from the computer, computes an error check (CRC) for the packet, modulates it into audio frequencies, and puts out appropriate signals to transmit the packet over the connected radio. It also reverses the process, translating the audio that the connected radio receives into a byte stream that is then sent to the computer.
Most amateurs currently use 1200 bps (bits per second) for local VHF and UHF packet, and 300 bps for longer distance, lower bandwidth HF communication. Higher speeds are available for use in the VHF, UHF, and especially microwave region, but they often require special (not plug-and-play) hardware and drivers.
Computer or Terminal
This is the user interface. A computer running a terminal emulator program, a packet-specific program, or just a dumb terminal can be used. For computers, almost any phone modem communications program (i.e. Procomm+, Bitcom, X-Talk) can be adapted for packet use, but there are also customized packet radio programs available. A dumb terminal, while possibly the cheapest option, does have several limitations. Most dumb terminals do not allow you to scroll backwards, store information, upload, or download files.
A radio
For 1200/2400 bps UHF/VHF packet, commonly available narrow band FM voice radios are used. For HF packet, 300 BPS data is used over single side band (SSB) modulation. For high speed packet (starting at 9600 bps), special radios or modified FM radios must be used. 1200 bps AFSK TNCs used on 2-meters (144-148Mhz) is the most commonly found packet radio.
Let's get to the point of this. The reason the Canadians are trying to replicate Supernovae is because Canada is TOO COLD*. They're doing this insidious dangerous experiment as part of their campaign to Make Canada Warmer. Sure, they could just burn all that oil instead of shipping it south of the border, but that's not enough - they want something Really Really Warm, and this not only solves the problem, it gets the job done a lot faster than shipping us aerosol cans full of ozone.
*I mean, how often have you seen a weather map on TV that has temperatures in Canada that are even 32 degrees? It'll be 72 in Seattle and just across the border in Vancouver it's 20 degrees. And when it's 35 degrees in Buffalo, it's usually like ZERO in Toronto.
Feist's Riftwar books - derivative but well-told
on
The Curse of Chalion
·
· Score: 1
OK, sometimes you want real literature, which Tolkien is, but sometimes you're looking for escape fiction, and a well-told tale with tolerably-developed characters is perfectly good enough to read at the beach or in the bathtub. Feist's books *aren't* Real Literature or close to it, but he takes Your Basic Adventure Yarn With The Map At The Beginning And Magicians And Bad Guys and tells it really well and entertainingly. Some of the books stand alone, though more of the later ones don't, but it's interesting to see the characters develop within books and to see how they develop *between* the books; he tends to jump by half- to one generation from book to book, and manages to keep it relatively fresh while doing so.
Tolkien "Black and White" ?!?!? Sure, there are some characters of each, but there's so much depth and complexity! You certainly couldn't call Smeagol/Gollum black or white (though he's occasionally kinda clear:-), and even major characters like Frodo have their very visible limitations.
Look, don't encourage them. Don't ask them questions when the default language in the contract says nothing and the obvious clueless corporate droid response is to say "No" and the smarter clueless corporate droid response is to say "No" and add it to the FAQ and Terms of Service so other people don't bother them with the issue again.
The main reasons they don't want VPN-like things are
Clueless Corporate Greed - some of the cablemodemcos and some of the telco DSL companies want to get more money by charging extra for anything that looks business-related, and don't realize that that's not what the market wants, especially if they're not providing any better actual *service* for their business-priced offers.*
Avoiding Support Headaches / Costs - somebody else, who used to do cablemodemco tech support, pointed out that they do get lots of difficult support calls from people whose corporate VPNs don't work right over cable modem service. One response said that the correct way to fix this is not to ban them, but to have an explicit "stuff you can try but we won't fix for you" list; the missing link you also need is to have a Technically Detailed FAQ about the network configuration. attached to the not-actively-supported list.
Generic Cluelessness - "That's a really scary technical-sounding acronym! We don't want to have to even figure out what that *is*, much less what people might be doing with it!
Business Cluelessness - Like *duh*, if people can get faster access to their work machines over cable modem, they'll buy cable modems from you instead of using dialup from the telephone companies, plus you get the benefit that teleworkers use a lot of their bandwidth at different times than game-playing kids.
Blazing Business/Technical Cluelessness - The way to get lots of people to WANT your service is for the market to discover and popularize KILLER APPS, and if some of them look like servers, THAT'S JUST FINE as long as it doesn't totally trash your bandwidth. YOU probably won't discover the app - it'll just happen, like Napster, or be sold by someone else, like Quake - so YOU need to make it EASY for OTHER PEOPLE to develop that killer app for you.
Because what you need most are Lots More Customers.
* Some of the business-class cable or DSL services actually do offer better-for-business service - better help desk response time or service quality, for instance, and in some cases higher bandwidth, plus obvious business-related services like more flexible billing, and bundled email and web services. It's tough for cable modems, though, because the fundamental service-scalability models behind the $40/month cost assume that It's Just Television, so the number of installation/repair technicians and trucks and help desk people assumes that if the service goes out on a snowy Friday night, you can read a book or talk to your kids or something and they'll fix it in the daytime after the storm's over and maybe credit you a few bucks or make HBO free for the next week. For a business client, you can put up with dial for a couple of days or read a manual or something, but actually providing business-server-class service isn't realistic; you'd have to provide a lot more trucks and technicians to make repair times much shorter.
Disclaimer: This is just my personal opinion, not my employer's, and it's Friday after 5:00 and I'm not wearing a suit, so don't bug them about it.
Disclaimer: This is just my opinion, not AT&T's. If it were AT&T's opinion, I'd be wearing a suit and tie while typing it and have a law-degree shingle on my wall.
AT&T had to do a lot of work to get the network switchover done in a hurry, though they'd been planning for a while. You'd think cable TV systems would have a uniform infrastructure, and that so would the cable modem bits, but it ain't that way; most cable TV systems evolved a town at a time in places where the town council's decision criteria had a lot more to do with whose brother-in-law got the street-paving contract than on which company had really forward-looking clues about telecommunications, and the bigger cablecos that bought up the former town-by-town franchises were doing well to get MTV and Pay-Per-View working everywhere, and the cable-modem-cos were trying to take this non-uniform infrastructure plus whatever level of quality and uniformity the cablecos added and rapidly evolving technology and make deals with cablecos who mainly *were* focused on selling the MTV and PPV. Leave aside that some of them were busy dropping billions of dollars on search engine and greeting-card companies hoping that would catalyze the public into buying their service, while trying to maintain some control on the amount of Napster (which really *was* getting the public to buy their service but simultaneously needing to be tuned heavily to avoid trashing network performance while needing to be disavowed to prevent the TV-side of the cablecos from getting into intellectual property problems with them:-)
Throttling your upstream bandwidth to 128kbps is reasonable - the technology is heavily asymmetric with limited upstream, and the anti-server rule was originally primarily because they didn't have the techology to limit individual users' upstream transmission rates.
Throttling the downstream bandwidth reeks - I don't know how much total bandwidth they're dropping to each head end, but I'm surprised they'd want to cut it this far and face public backlash when that's one of their main competitive advantages over DSL.
Static addresses? Not surprising to lose those - dynamic addressing is *much* easier for the carrier to manage, and they don't have to keep track of as much individual user information, plus it fits well with the standard MS and Linux client network support tools and strongly reduces support calls from users trying to set up their systems. It also makes it easier to run multiple client machines without a NAT box:-) It does also harass people who run web servers, but that's a job for Dyndns and similar services.
RARP for Security? What a bizarre approach - anybody who uses it deserves to lose badly! There's no guarantee that a telnet client is even *on* an Ethernet-like network, and for security reasons it's not clear that that kind of protocol ought to be passing very far across a network.
Reverse DNS - Is that what you meant? That's a much different issue. Reverse DNS should work, because there are *lots* of sites that use it for authentication. If you were confused, and this was what you really meant that they trashed, find a popular ftp archive that insists on it (I think ftp.uu.net does, for instance) and call them back and complain about that, since it's much more likely to be in the technicians Help-Desk-FAQ and triggers "things couch-potato users expect to work" reflexes instead of "sounds scarily technical" reflexes.:-)
Support queue length - If that's a telephone waiting time, and not an email/web-response waiting time, that's *way* too long for a professional quality service, but remember that they've just had a couple of *really special* weeks, and some appallingly high fraction of their customer base is calling them.
Remember the Disclaimer. You're getting very sleepy, and you don't remember any relationship between the poster, who seems to work at "spambert.com" and any Big Telecom Companies. These aren't the corporate droids you're looking for. They can move along
Early cheap home NAT boxes trashed many VPN protocols, as well as trashing a number of other protocols. They've gotten better - many of the current products pass IPSEC to at least one LAN-side machine, and many of them pass a variety of other protocols as well (if you're using PPTP, your employer needs to get a better VPN, but check your firewall box anyway.) Some companies use proprietary tunneling products, but many of those products are just IPSEC with a proprietary authentication method, and can do ok on an updated NAT box.
Also, check if your NAT box has firmware upgrades available - several products such as Linksys originally shipped without VPN-transparency, but have later firmware you can flash-upgrade to add the capabilities.
As the economy tanks, you can expect some stupid and greedy employers to say "aha, we'll put the screws to our workers, get rid of perks, and make them show up at the office at 9:00 or treat them like that Neo guy". You can also expect some smart and greedy employers to say "aha, I need to get the most possible work out of my employees so I'll make it easy for them to work for ME anytime, anywhere, any way they can" and some extra-smart, extra-greedy employers to say "aha, in this economy I need all the productivity and creativity I can squeeze out of the few employees I can afford on my limited venture capital and annoyingly-low sales revenue, so I'll try treating them like *real*human*beings* and act like I respect them and spend the budget I can scrape up on productivity enhancers like fast network connections and good coffee and extra disk drives instead of $1000 chairs, especially since enticing them with stock options is a lot harder than it used to be." Of course, any manager, from the dumb to the extra-smart, will try to get around greedy cable-tv-company restrictions on applications:-)
You guys just haven't caught up with Today's Holiday Gift from Microsoft yet. My company's got tens of thousands of people using LookOut, and mailing lists that reach large parts of the company, so it only took one or two clueless people or people with machines that weren't updated after the previous few viruses to send it to everybody, at which point some fraction of either clueless or mis-configured mailers started blasting everybody.
So, "hi", we're in a "harry" here, and MS Outlook has been turned into a really lame screensaver as the mailerservers either crash under load or get shut down or put into heavy-duty-filter mode. The payload is about 45KB of compressed data, expanding to the now-well-known 159KB, so multiply that by the 2000+ messages I succeeded in receiving today is about 90MB. The folks on dialup fortunately can't transmit that fast:-)
I don't know if this will work without a monitor - probably not, though I've seen television interference without one. But your laptop probably has a VGA port on the back that you could plug into a monitor to play the funky music.
Slashdot Mirror
What the label is providing is knowledge about how to sell music, and how to make music that sells, which is only partially related to how to make music that sounds good. But what they're really providing in return for your soul, first-born child, and ownership of your music is that they're running the business and hiring you to play music for them, like a bar owner hiring you to play for the evening, unlike the computer venture capitalist deal where the VC lends you money, owns much of the stock, but you run the business as well as making the product. Why can't you just buy studio time yourself? Theoretically you can, and if you can market your music successfully, cool. Studios are a lot less expensive than they used to be, but advertising is more expensive, but delivering product is less expensive. It's getting to be time to kick the chair out from under the traditional industry structure.
Note: the payments aren't per taxpayer, of course, they're per piece of recording medium, which is much less obnoxious, since it's not taxing people who aren't recording anything. So if it bothers you that the tax covers media that you record non-audio material on, go get yourself a copy of Morpheus and download some Metallica tunes.
I suppose it might randomly overload your speakers, but if your equipment is decent it'll have some kind of anti-self-destruction limitations built in. The copy protection dreck just gives you lots of bad bits which a computer player will reject and an audio player will error-correct (unless, of course, somebody writes different error-correction software for the computer-based players.)
Typical prices at Fry's are about 15 cents for el-cheapo CDRs on sale, and maybe 50 cents for name-brand not-on-sale. So if that's 50 cents Canadian, that's still got room for 22 cents tax, though only for the cheap brands.
I don't know if this technology has problems with it, but another classic telephony problem is crosstalk - signals leaking from one wire to another one nearby. That's one of the reasons for using good twisted-pair cabling, which reduces it.
Ignore the fact that they catalyzed the web market (either as Netscape or as their preceding life as the Mosaic free university-ware browser) by making it easy to view pictures and text on the same page, as opposed to the previous ftp-like interfaces. And those Bad Bad Netscape Monopolists destroyed the chances for REAL HYPERTEXT which the Xanadu project was planning to ship Real Soon (after a mere 25 years of development :-).
Also, people *do* make superior browsers. The World Wide Web Consortium W3.org has done a variety of browsers that are cleaner, smaller, and more correct than the big MS and NetscapeZilla product suites. Opera has been lured away into bloatware by the evils of flashiness and feature creep, so they're no longer the lean, mean, fits-on-a-floppy browser that their wonderful early versions were, but they're still a lot smaller than their major competitors. And there are bunches of EMACS-based browser hacks, which were the original integrated browser/mailtool/newsreader/wordprocessor suite. (It's no longer "Eight Megabytes", but it's still "And Continually Swapping".
The interesting thing about Passfaces ( other than the idea that a small number of face choices is as secure as anything but a PIN-length password), is that most people can recognize faces well but can't describe them verbally well enough to reveal their passfaces to anybody else, even under coercion or court order. Rough descriptions ("it's a guy with a beard" "it's a woman with short hair") are easy, but they shuffle the faces around enough that unless the Bad Guys are showing you the actual pictures, you can't give a usefully repeatable description.
There are some kind of applications that work fine in isolation, and if this is one of them, cool. But most real-world businesses need to be connected to the rest of the world - either the Internet, or privatge networks (e.g. bank data centers talking to ATMs). The article doesn't mention physically redundant communications, though I assume they probably did use a fiber ring of some sort, which means it takes *two* backhoe hits before they're off the net and not just one. But if they're this paranoid, and not just hyping themselves, they need some radio or satellite connectivity, enough voice diversity (or cell phones) so they can talk if their phone connection gets cut, and ideally geographical diversity so that if something does go seriously wrong (flood, earthquake, etc.) they can run from their other location.
OK, so they built the Tardis, and occasionally invest in some styrofoam rocks or cardboard monster robots, but it's nice to have a show where they don't let special effects budget drive *too* much of the plot :-)
Whenever I use 10.x addresses, I never use 10.1.*.* - 10.10.*.*, and usually pick a random number to subnet under (10.RAND.*.*) so that if I have to merge it with another numbering system, there's less chance of collisions, renumbering, NAT, etc.
Yes, you could get a $1500 desktop machine if you want to spend $1000 on a really good flat-screen display - and if this were still the Dot-Com-Boom of 1997 instead of the Dot-Com-Bust of 2001 you'd do it in an instant, but this year, you'd only spend that because it's really nice, not because it's actually enhancing your ability to do work.
The real must-have component for your desk-top machine - it's the $25 plastic slide-out disk drive drawer, so you can upgrade that 20GB drive to an 80GB drive without disassembling the box. (And of course the CD-R, because 650MB CD-Rs are cheaper than floppies these days.)
Hear, hear. For personal use (since I'm not a gamer, and don't use my PC as a substitute for a television :-), I don't need multi-GHz processing, especially if I'm not wasting it on patronizing bloatware user interfaces, and I don't need a Beowulf cluster in my garage. For business applications, there are obvious applications like encryption for web servers (lots of SSL sessions, though custom accelerator boards (or less-custom DSPs) are often worthwhile ways to speed that up) or database searching - but that one parallelizes well, and the real performance problems are usually in how you handle the disk drives. The old Teradata Database Engines had up to 432 processors, each with their own disk drives, and a funky fast bus connecting them - the master processors would split up database queries into slices that each little CPU could go search on and then collect the results back together. You could build similar things today using PCs and either chains of fast Ethernet - Beowulf is designed for more general-purpose applications, but much of the philosophy is reusable, and the techniques for splitting up queries can probably be adapted easily enough. Inktomi/b> and similar highly parallelizable indexing and search engines are another point in the loosely-coupled-processing space, though obviously you're not going to run a massive web-crawler in your garage behind a little DSL connection - the processing needs to balance the network bandwidth.
That's enough to change how you interact with a PDA - instead of a screen interface with handwriting input, you can do an earphone/mike interface, voice input, voice output for many things, though possibly a screen as well. Obviously you'd want to integrate it with a cellphone and voicemail. E-Books are probably way too annoying when read through most common text-to-speech systems, but perhaps the new AT&T Labs Natural Voice stuff is good enough.
Some of that can probably be done with much lower-end speech-recognition, and possibly with speaker-independent. The Sprint voice-dialed cellphone is a cute trick - the memory and speech recognition parts can live in the server side of the system, but since the system knows it's *your* cellphone, it only needs to look up your few dozen phone numbers, rather than having to recognize across their entire subscriber bases' set of "Mom", "Home", "Work" voice patterns.
At somewhat the opposite ends of the spectrum, friends of mine who lived in an apartment building Palo Alto a decade or so ago wired it for Ethernet (Thinwire, aka 10base2, aka Cheapernet.) They had a startup company with offices in one apartment and several of them living in various apartments in the building, so telecommuting was even more convenient. I think they had a T1 feeding the business at the beginning, and after the business moved out to a Real Apartment they shared some kind of fractional T connection among the interested tenants.
The first network wired house I looked at when househunting achieved its status in about the most minimal form possible - there were two adjacent rooms with 10base2 jacks on the wall connected by about 6 inches of cable
Agreed - that's not really the right kind of property to convert to apartments - they're designed with lots of electricity and telcom cable feeds, but not made with lots of entrances, and they've got WAY more network bandwidth than anybody needs at home. What you really want (if you like living in a big city), is to be in an apartment building near the telco hotel, so you can get some cheap network access from some non-telco customer willing to put radio or infrared on the roof. Newer apartment buildings can be wired; older ones can be wireless (and the new 802.11a 55+Mbps wireless are enough faster if 10Mbps isn't enough.)
In addition to AirFiber, there's also Terabeam doing building-to-building optical technology. They're in the 100Mbps - 1Gbps speed ranges, with distances of 1km if you don't have fog, or 500 meters if you get fog (they're based in Seattle, so they've had plenty of weather to get real experience with :-) I think there are also a variety of other equipment makers.
The most popular stuff seems to be 1200 baud on 2-meter, which is line-of-sight plus repeaters, though there's some 300 baud HF stuff that has more chance of going city-to-city, and some fancier 9600 baud stuff.
Here's some text snagged from The FAQ at TAPR.ORG
TNC (terminal Node Controller)
A TNC contains a modem, a computer processor (CPU), and the associated circuitry required to convert communications between your computer (RS-232) and the packet radio protocol in use. A TNC assembles a packet from data received from the computer, computes an error check (CRC) for the packet, modulates it into audio frequencies, and puts out appropriate signals to transmit the packet over the connected radio. It also reverses the process, translating the audio that the connected radio receives into a byte stream that is then sent to the computer.
Most amateurs currently use 1200 bps (bits per second) for local VHF and UHF packet, and 300 bps for longer distance, lower bandwidth HF communication. Higher speeds are available for use in the VHF, UHF, and especially microwave region, but they often require special (not plug-and-play) hardware and drivers.
Computer or Terminal
This is the user interface. A computer running a terminal emulator program, a packet-specific program, or just a dumb terminal can be used. For computers, almost any phone modem communications program (i.e. Procomm+, Bitcom, X-Talk) can be adapted for packet use, but there are also customized packet radio programs available. A dumb terminal, while possibly the cheapest option, does have several limitations. Most dumb terminals do not allow you to scroll backwards, store information, upload, or download files.
A radio
For 1200/2400 bps UHF/VHF packet, commonly available narrow band FM voice radios are used. For HF packet, 300 BPS data is used over single side band (SSB) modulation. For high speed packet (starting at 9600 bps), special radios or modified FM radios must be used. 1200 bps AFSK TNCs used on 2-meters (144-148Mhz) is the most commonly found packet radio.
*I mean, how often have you seen a weather map on TV that has temperatures in Canada that are even 32 degrees? It'll be 72 in Seattle and just across the border in Vancouver it's 20 degrees. And when it's 35 degrees in Buffalo, it's usually like ZERO in Toronto.
Tolkien "Black and White" ?!?!? Sure, there are some characters of each, but there's so much depth and complexity! You certainly couldn't call Smeagol/Gollum black or white (though he's occasionally kinda clear :-), and even major characters like Frodo have their very visible limitations.
The main reasons they don't want VPN-like things are
Because what you need most are Lots More Customers.
* Some of the business-class cable or DSL services actually do offer better-for-business service - better help desk response time or service quality, for instance, and in some cases higher bandwidth, plus obvious business-related services like more flexible billing, and bundled email and web services. It's tough for cable modems, though, because the fundamental service-scalability models behind the $40/month cost assume that It's Just Television, so the number of installation/repair technicians and trucks and help desk people assumes that if the service goes out on a snowy Friday night, you can read a book or talk to your kids or something and they'll fix it in the daytime after the storm's over and maybe credit you a few bucks or make HBO free for the next week. For a business client, you can put up with dial for a couple of days or read a manual or something, but actually providing business-server-class service isn't realistic; you'd have to provide a lot more trucks and technicians to make repair times much shorter.
Disclaimer: This is just my personal opinion, not my employer's, and it's Friday after 5:00 and I'm not wearing a suit, so don't bug them about it.
AT&T had to do a lot of work to get the network switchover done in a hurry, though they'd been planning for a while. You'd think cable TV systems would have a uniform infrastructure, and that so would the cable modem bits, but it ain't that way; most cable TV systems evolved a town at a time in places where the town council's decision criteria had a lot more to do with whose brother-in-law got the street-paving contract than on which company had really forward-looking clues about telecommunications, and the bigger cablecos that bought up the former town-by-town franchises were doing well to get MTV and Pay-Per-View working everywhere, and the cable-modem-cos were trying to take this non-uniform infrastructure plus whatever level of quality and uniformity the cablecos added and rapidly evolving technology and make deals with cablecos who mainly *were* focused on selling the MTV and PPV. Leave aside that some of them were busy dropping billions of dollars on search engine and greeting-card companies hoping that would catalyze the public into buying their service, while trying to maintain some control on the amount of Napster (which really *was* getting the public to buy their service but simultaneously needing to be tuned heavily to avoid trashing network performance while needing to be disavowed to prevent the TV-side of the cablecos from getting into intellectual property problems with them
Remember the Disclaimer. You're getting very sleepy, and you don't remember any relationship between the poster, who seems to work at "spambert.com" and any Big Telecom Companies. These aren't the corporate droids you're looking for. They can move along
Also, check if your NAT box has firmware upgrades available - several products such as Linksys originally shipped without VPN-transparency, but have later firmware you can flash-upgrade to add the capabilities.
As the economy tanks, you can expect some stupid and greedy employers to say "aha, we'll put the screws to our workers, get rid of perks, and make them show up at the office at 9:00 or treat them like that Neo guy". You can also expect some smart and greedy employers to say "aha, I need to get the most possible work out of my employees so I'll make it easy for them to work for ME anytime, anywhere, any way they can" and some extra-smart, extra-greedy employers to say "aha, in this economy I need all the productivity and creativity I can squeeze out of the few employees I can afford on my limited venture capital and annoyingly-low sales revenue, so I'll try treating them like *real*human*beings* and act like I respect them and spend the budget I can scrape up on productivity enhancers like fast network connections and good coffee and extra disk drives instead of $1000 chairs, especially since enticing them with stock options is a lot harder than it used to be." Of course, any manager, from the dumb to the extra-smart, will try to get around greedy cable-tv-company restrictions on applications :-)
So, "hi", we're in a "harry" here, and MS Outlook has been turned into a really lame screensaver as the mailerservers either crash under load or get shut down or put into heavy-duty-filter mode. The payload is about 45KB of compressed data, expanding to the now-well-known 159KB, so multiply that by the 2000+ messages I succeeded in receiving today is about 90MB. The folks on dialup fortunately can't transmit that fast :-)
I don't know if this will work without a monitor - probably not, though I've seen television interference without one. But your laptop probably has a VGA port on the back that you could plug into a monitor to play the funky music.