My recent experience with Broadstripe(Cablespeed in disguise).
I try NBC.com video stutters and buffers every 3 seconds. I try Hulu video stutters and buffers every 3 seconds. I try Netflix and video stutters and gives me "3 hours" to ensure smooth playback.
I give up and bittorrent it.
2 days later "We've registered a copyright violation on your connection and will be disconnecting you. You get three free reconnects after which it'll cost $30."
My bandwidth is fine--over an average of 30 seconds. Within 10 seconds it'll fluxuate between dialup and real internet. For normal browsing that's unnoticeable for gaming and streaming... it's useless. So they can honestly claim I'm getting my bandwidth but it's in how you measure it.
They've successfully managed to 'sabotage' the legal not-cable options while leaving browsing intact. The part I find even more stupendous is that they disconnect you without consultation or verification and guess who gets the fee if you are a repeat offender? Them. So the cable company has begun enforcing copyright infringement and charging copyright violation charges! The cable company is profiteering from piracy!
I went to private school school too. It was run by the Seventh Day Adventist Church. The expectations were higher. They expelled failing students and sent them back to public school and graded much much harder than a public school. It also cost about what you're paying.
But the only reason they could grade more severely is because they could afford to fail kids out of their system without fear of consequence. The only reason they could charge $4,000 a year is because they were subsidized by the church and private donations. I think I saw a statistic where something like 60-70% of my tuition was from private donation.
Going further: compared to my local public school we had less computers, older computers, less scientific equipment for physics and chemistry, less athletic equipment, a smaller library, no free instruments (I own a $3,000 cello), no Audio Video equipment, extremely limited arts equipment and space, limited wood working and shop space/equipment and unsubsidized hot lunches which raised the cost of food in building from about $40-50 a month for hot lunch to around $100-$125. Also our school provided no transportation so you had to pay for your own public bus service or drive a car to school yourself.
Ask your school's principle how much the ACTUAL cost for a student attending your child's school is and how their resources per child compare. Then add in food and transportation.
I thought the Bush Administration was very upfront about the motivation for this 'emergency' rule (To get around the H-1B stalemate). Summary sounds like it's breeding controversy where none exists.
Now whether or not we NEED more H1Bs... that's a point of debate.
Screw credibility. Cut his Internet and let him know who did it. If he doesn't want to play fair and cooperate with the person accommodating him he can get his own Internet.
One of the drawbacks of what I would suspect is really cheap rent is you have to be considerate of those who are helping you out and not be an ass.
My roomate and I were both very aware of the effects of P2P. If one of us wanted to use the net and it was slow we just knocked on the other's door and let them know we needed more bandwidth. It was very intelligent packet shaping. If you noticed a problem, you throttled, if you didn't notice you let it be.
Re:Looks like they've made some improvements.
on
Blender 2.46 Released
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
Speaking as someone who uses more than 3 different 3D apps and 3+ 2D apps on a regular basis. And speaking as someone who is familiar and able to work in dozens more (some with exceedingly unusual interfaces) I can say that's a load of bull.
It's not about "in crowd" it's about responding to the ACTUAL demands of someone who uses the program day in and day out.
I'm not going to say any program has a fantasic interface but that's partly because when people talk about "interface" they aren't talking about the button layout-- they're talking about the workflow. How the user moves from one task to another, how the program responds to actions you take, how a user can review and revise multiple versions, how a user can arrange data to their particular needs. These questions and solutions extend far beyond where you put a button or how a button is pressed. These are solutions that are largely determined by people who UNDERSTAND how the application is supposed to be used.
How you 'use' the application is the interface and that is why people complain about Gimp and Blender. The interfaces seem to be designed by people who don't understand how their program is used to create greate art.
Here is why. Because despite our most adamant selfish arguments our actions DO affect other people. Even suicide has a cost to society.
It's a question of commons: "Why should you care what I dump on my lawn? It's my lawn and I'll pour toxic chemicals on it if I want to."
The more smokers our country has the more resources we throw at it and the greater cost society as a whole has to pay. It's like taxing pollution: the cost of cleaning it up almost NEVER fully comes from the person who did the polluting. They'll find a way to file bankrupcy, sherk responsibility or simply never be charged with the damage they commit. Taxing oil transport for instance is indirectly ensuring that an oil company pays for its inevitable mess.
Restricting smoking decreases the cost to society as someone drives up the cost of living for non-smokers. The argument against obesity is the same. If obesity is in fact driving up the cost of food directly and eating less would reduce the cost of food. And if a high food price contributes to the deaths of people in third world countries then your actions are indirectly causing other people harm and you aren't JUST hurting yourself and your arteries you're hurting other people as well and they have a right to protest your infringement of their right to nutrition.
Just out of curiosity... how many computers a year do you lose to bad capacitors?
30% still seems astronomically high to me. I would have guessed 3% or similar. What is it that you're doing where 100% of a brand of motherboards burn out?
Yeah the edge distortion is the problem. If they were really serious about delivering something of value they would also include a DX Scene shader to distort the image to compensate. The edges would be lower resolution but they would at least not look stretched.
It would also require some really careful calibration by the user.
All around.. product gets a big thumbs down from me as well.
Wars do a couple of really 'great' things for research though:
1) The government is willing to spend all of our money on it at the cost of buying TVs, Cars, big houses and the like. 2) People are willing to take extreme risks because unsafe technology still might be safer than inferior technology. So you can convince the government to just have a test pilot get in a plane and try to fly it instead of spending 5 years on feasibility studies. If you lose 100 test pilots it's just par for the course and an acceptable loss. "Acceptable sacrifice" during peace time sometimes approaches 0 in the case of NASA. 3) Extreme time constraints: Everything gets tested quickly because building a better airfoil literally is a matter of life and death. 4) Necessitating application. Having worked with an advanced aernautical research group I can tell you that the one I worked with (which is the R&D division of a houshold name aeronatics company) wasted probably 80% of the resources I saw simply because they had no direction or concept of application. I will always remember the lesson that my Calculus teacher taught our class and it was "What do you want?" If you can't answer that question you aren't going to get much of anything. Engineers are great at solving a problem. If left to their own devices they're not very good at *finding* problems so they just tinker aimlessly (I know broad stereotype I'm sorry). As much as Engineers hate management (Dilbert Syndrome) a visionairy leadership in charge of adept problem solvers is going to be infinitely more productive than just a team of problem solvers led by problem solvers. In war the problem identifiers (pilots, soldiers, generals etc...) are put to work hand in hand with the problem solvers. "We need a device which can accurately deliver a payload of explosives onto another continent. Make it happen."
If you've discovered a way of getting billions of dollars of funding without having any clear objectives, please contact me privately at yeahrightwhatever@gmail.com.
It's the girls. The girls choose one at random and the guys all switch to that.
MSN, SMS, MySpace... wherever the teenage girls go... the guys soon follow.
Teenage Girls sadly are dictating modern technology. Why do you think SMS costs so much? Highschool girls who don't have to pay for their cell phone bills, that's who!
Select the colors [0,0,0] and [10,10,10]. Now create canvas as wide as your screen and create a gradient.
It'll look like you have 10 giant blocks. Now it still faces the same problem of delivering to 24 bpp displays for DVD but most LCDs have problem with even displaying 24bpp correctly. 30 will be headroom to ensure that at the very least the 24bpp will be rendered correctly.
Also the film and VFX company LARGELY works in 36-48bpp (12-16bit) and is moving to 96bpp (32bit) for all VFX.
There isn't a high end digital cinema camera that shoots below 10 bit (30bpp) log (12 bit linear (36bpp)) at this point. Film is almost exclusively scanned at 12-16bit color.
The only reason gradients even ever look ok on your display is because it's almost always dithered (noised) to compensate.
If you're going back out to film or a modern cinema projector you are also not going to be 'printing' to 8bit color.
Server glitch. Because I'm able to send Youtube links just fine. I"ve never had a problem sending youtube links.
I did have problems with AIM yesterday trying to send a legitimate License # to a co-worker for a piece of software with a floating license! And Aim blocks all kinds of comments.
The reason he sent it to the attorney is because he's forbidden to send direct communication to Zelnick or Rockstar Games due to the terms a previous lawsuit.
Little trick I picked up a few years back. Embed an autorefresh javascript--first thing. Then you can just let the page sit in a window on a second monitor. Code away. Every 3 or 4 seconds you get an updated view.
Really great for tweaking image placement and other little minutia.
Because when you purchase a dual quad core workstation upon whose performance your livelihood depends the internet is large and dangerous place to expose a computer to. Especially when you're working with rough cuts of feature films which the masses would love to get an advance copy of.
Also if you have a client show up the last thing you want is a crashing computer.
Most of these people also have a laptop off to the side for internet.
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Now obviously the article part would need to be parsed by a reader of sorts. But you already create a site map usually so creating a link map for every page split by categories would be simple. Through voice command:
List Navigation: "Top, Secions..." List Navigation Top: "Help and Preferences, Subscribe, Firehose.." Go to Navigation, Top, Firehose.
I replied to another post but in essence. My DSL was out too.:|
I ignored it for a week since my DSL was still working. Then I was out of town for 2 weeks. And I ignored it for another week when I got back because I was busy unpacking etc.
Dumbass. Who doesn't have DSL and Cable in case one or the other is flakey?:D
My cable pings got above 300 regularly. So I switched to DSL. Just in case DSL ended up sucky I kept my Cable until I got the DSL all hooked up and happy. (If I cancel my Cable and need it back I know the backlogs are more than 3 weeks for installation).
DSL was installed and it immediately was plagued with outages (about 50% of the time it was down) but the pings when it was up were in the nice low 20s-40s. So what is a geek to do? Give up on his DSL low pings in exchange for consistant bandwidth and browsing or give up on gaming on weekends? It's a tough call, so I didn't make it hoping one or the other would stabilize.
My DSL was churning along quite happily all off a sudden and went an entire week without going out. So I started planning the death of my cable which is the time when it decides to die. I had switched some billing information about 2 months previously on it and the last time I had done that they didn't properly mark me down as "Autopay" and cut my cable for late payment. I'm thinking DSL seems to have cleared the pipes and is reliable I'll just call them next week and get it all sorted out and cancel all at the same time. Well a week later my DSL goes down. So of course the soonest non-business hours time they can come is the next weekend. (Myself still hoping this is a DSL issue that can be resolved once and for all giving me good internet waits until the weekend.) Weekend verdict (DSL Guy) "I can't fix it. I'm going to need to call someone else in but it won't be until sometime this week." (Still hoping that DSL will get working waits all week) No word from DSL company. Friday comes.
Me: "Someone 'else' was supposed to come out and fix my DSL. Still have no DSL." QWest: "We have no record of someone scheduled to fix your DSL--it's listed as fixed and the support call was closed." Me: "Well it's not and the guy said 'someone else is coming'." (After 30 minutes on hold.) QWest: "Turns out they have to dig up your line and they can't provide an eta because they need city approval."
The words "City Approval" make me reach for the cable company's phone number.
Broadstripe: "We can't get someone out on a saturday or sunday until the weekend after next and we can't fix it from here." Me: "I'm leaving for New Zealand for 2 weeks next saturday it'll have to wait." Broadstripe: "I'll just put a hold on your account until you get back. Have a nice trip."
I'm back now... and trying to deal with it.
DSL has yet to even start digging up the lines (But they did spray paint!). Broadstripe is being a smartass and Verizon is still 40 miles away (Which means at least 5 years by my reckoning).
Oh and I suppose there is also Clearwire WiMax but it's high latency, bad bandwidth and I live in a reception black hole.
Me: My Cable is Out. Broadstripe: Sure enough it looks like there are several places in Seattle experiencing some outages. Crews are out. Is there anything else I can help you with. Me: Yes. My Cable is out and I'm pretty sure that it's mostly unrelated to those outages. It's been out for a month. It was out yesterday. It was out the week before that. A cable guy came out to turn on my neighbor's cable... and the same day when I got home from work my internet was down.... Pause as I assume this is the point where I'll get a scheduled service call...
Broadstripe: If the cable is out across parts of Seattle how can you conclude that your problem is unrelated. Me: Because I assume that most of Seattle hasn't been without cable for a MONTH. Broadstripe: We can send someone out between 9am and 6pm on Monday.
(Yeah sure I'll just take a day off from work to wait for the cable guy. Thanks but no thanks.)
Slashdot Mirror
My recent experience with Broadstripe(Cablespeed in disguise).
I try NBC.com video stutters and buffers every 3 seconds.
I try Hulu video stutters and buffers every 3 seconds.
I try Netflix and video stutters and gives me "3 hours" to ensure smooth playback.
I give up and bittorrent it.
2 days later "We've registered a copyright violation on your connection and will be disconnecting you. You get three free reconnects after which it'll cost $30."
My bandwidth is fine--over an average of 30 seconds. Within 10 seconds it'll fluxuate between dialup and real internet. For normal browsing that's unnoticeable for gaming and streaming... it's useless. So they can honestly claim I'm getting my bandwidth but it's in how you measure it.
They've successfully managed to 'sabotage' the legal not-cable options while leaving browsing intact. The part I find even more stupendous is that they disconnect you without consultation or verification and guess who gets the fee if you are a repeat offender? Them. So the cable company has begun enforcing copyright infringement and charging copyright violation charges! The cable company is profiteering from piracy!
I went to private school school too. It was run by the Seventh Day Adventist Church. The expectations were higher. They expelled failing students and sent them back to public school and graded much much harder than a public school. It also cost about what you're paying.
But the only reason they could grade more severely is because they could afford to fail kids out of their system without fear of consequence. The only reason they could charge $4,000 a year is because they were subsidized by the church and private donations. I think I saw a statistic where something like 60-70% of my tuition was from private donation.
Going further: compared to my local public school we had less computers, older computers, less scientific equipment for physics and chemistry, less athletic equipment, a smaller library, no free instruments (I own a $3,000 cello), no Audio Video equipment, extremely limited arts equipment and space, limited wood working and shop space/equipment and unsubsidized hot lunches which raised the cost of food in building from about $40-50 a month for hot lunch to around $100-$125. Also our school provided no transportation so you had to pay for your own public bus service or drive a car to school yourself.
Ask your school's principle how much the ACTUAL cost for a student attending your child's school is and how their resources per child compare. Then add in food and transportation.
I thought the Bush Administration was very upfront about the motivation for this 'emergency' rule (To get around the H-1B stalemate). Summary sounds like it's breeding controversy where none exists.
Now whether or not we NEED more H1Bs... that's a point of debate.
A red duotone Buddy Christ was in the final rounds of market research.
Seen here in the famously leaked image.
Screw credibility. Cut his Internet and let him know who did it. If he doesn't want to play fair and cooperate with the person accommodating him he can get his own Internet.
One of the drawbacks of what I would suspect is really cheap rent is you have to be considerate of those who are helping you out and not be an ass.
My roomate and I were both very aware of the effects of P2P. If one of us wanted to use the net and it was slow we just knocked on the other's door and let them know we needed more bandwidth. It was very intelligent packet shaping. If you noticed a problem, you throttled, if you didn't notice you let it be.
Speaking as someone who uses more than 3 different 3D apps and 3+ 2D apps on a regular basis. And speaking as someone who is familiar and able to work in dozens more (some with exceedingly unusual interfaces) I can say that's a load of bull.
It's not about "in crowd" it's about responding to the ACTUAL demands of someone who uses the program day in and day out.
I'm not going to say any program has a fantasic interface but that's partly because when people talk about "interface" they aren't talking about the button layout-- they're talking about the workflow. How the user moves from one task to another, how the program responds to actions you take, how a user can review and revise multiple versions, how a user can arrange data to their particular needs. These questions and solutions extend far beyond where you put a button or how a button is pressed. These are solutions that are largely determined by people who UNDERSTAND how the application is supposed to be used.
How you 'use' the application is the interface and that is why people complain about Gimp and Blender. The interfaces seem to be designed by people who don't understand how their program is used to create greate art.
The largest problem isn't the interface. It's what's behind the interface.
Here is why. Because despite our most adamant selfish arguments our actions DO affect other people. Even suicide has a cost to society.
It's a question of commons: "Why should you care what I dump on my lawn? It's my lawn and I'll pour toxic chemicals on it if I want to."
The more smokers our country has the more resources we throw at it and the greater cost society as a whole has to pay. It's like taxing pollution: the cost of cleaning it up almost NEVER fully comes from the person who did the polluting. They'll find a way to file bankrupcy, sherk responsibility or simply never be charged with the damage they commit. Taxing oil transport for instance is indirectly ensuring that an oil company pays for its inevitable mess.
Restricting smoking decreases the cost to society as someone drives up the cost of living for non-smokers. The argument against obesity is the same. If obesity is in fact driving up the cost of food directly and eating less would reduce the cost of food. And if a high food price contributes to the deaths of people in third world countries then your actions are indirectly causing other people harm and you aren't JUST hurting yourself and your arteries you're hurting other people as well and they have a right to protest your infringement of their right to nutrition.
Just out of curiosity... how many computers a year do you lose to bad capacitors?
30% still seems astronomically high to me. I would have guessed 3% or similar. What is it that you're doing where 100% of a brand of motherboards burn out?
Yeah the edge distortion is the problem. If they were really serious about delivering something of value they would also include a DX Scene shader to distort the image to compensate. The edges would be lower resolution but they would at least not look stretched.
It would also require some really careful calibration by the user.
All around.. product gets a big thumbs down from me as well.
Wars do a couple of really 'great' things for research though:
1) The government is willing to spend all of our money on it at the cost of buying TVs, Cars, big houses and the like.
2) People are willing to take extreme risks because unsafe technology still might be safer than inferior technology. So you can convince the government to just have a test pilot get in a plane and try to fly it instead of spending 5 years on feasibility studies. If you lose 100 test pilots it's just par for the course and an acceptable loss. "Acceptable sacrifice" during peace time sometimes approaches 0 in the case of NASA.
3) Extreme time constraints: Everything gets tested quickly because building a better airfoil literally is a matter of life and death.
4) Necessitating application. Having worked with an advanced aernautical research group I can tell you that the one I worked with (which is the R&D division of a houshold name aeronatics company) wasted probably 80% of the resources I saw simply because they had no direction or concept of application. I will always remember the lesson that my Calculus teacher taught our class and it was "What do you want?" If you can't answer that question you aren't going to get much of anything. Engineers are great at solving a problem. If left to their own devices they're not very good at *finding* problems so they just tinker aimlessly (I know broad stereotype I'm sorry). As much as Engineers hate management (Dilbert Syndrome) a visionairy leadership in charge of adept problem solvers is going to be infinitely more productive than just a team of problem solvers led by problem solvers. In war the problem identifiers (pilots, soldiers, generals etc...) are put to work hand in hand with the problem solvers. "We need a device which can accurately deliver a payload of explosives onto another continent. Make it happen."
No problem with Rahip on my end.
It's the girls. The girls choose one at random and the guys all switch to that.
MSN, SMS, MySpace... wherever the teenage girls go... the guys soon follow.
Teenage Girls sadly are dictating modern technology. Why do you think SMS costs so much? Highschool girls who don't have to pay for their cell phone bills, that's who!
Dead wrong.
Load Gimp, Photoshop or any other program.
Grab the gradient tool.
Select the colors [0,0,0] and [10,10,10]. Now create canvas as wide as your screen and create a gradient.
It'll look like you have 10 giant blocks. Now it still faces the same problem of delivering to 24 bpp displays for DVD but most LCDs have problem with even displaying 24bpp correctly. 30 will be headroom to ensure that at the very least the 24bpp will be rendered correctly.
Also the film and VFX company LARGELY works in 36-48bpp (12-16bit) and is moving to 96bpp (32bit) for all VFX.
There isn't a high end digital cinema camera that shoots below 10 bit (30bpp) log (12 bit linear (36bpp)) at this point. Film is almost exclusively scanned at 12-16bit color.
The only reason gradients even ever look ok on your display is because it's almost always dithered (noised) to compensate.
If you're going back out to film or a modern cinema projector you are also not going to be 'printing' to 8bit color.
MS Fanboy at the ready!
Here is how I explain it:
Server glitch. Because I'm able to send Youtube links just fine. I"ve never had a problem sending youtube links.
I did have problems with AIM yesterday trying to send a legitimate License # to a co-worker for a piece of software with a floating license! And Aim blocks all kinds of comments.
In fact I've never had MSN Block a message.
I'm sure he could have found the address.
The reason he sent it to the attorney is because he's forbidden to send direct communication to Zelnick or Rockstar Games due to the terms a previous lawsuit.
Little trick I picked up a few years back. Embed an autorefresh javascript--first thing. Then you can just let the page sit in a window on a second monitor. Code away. Every 3 or 4 seconds you get an updated view.
Really great for tweaking image placement and other little minutia.
Because when you purchase a dual quad core workstation upon whose performance your livelihood depends the internet is large and dangerous place to expose a computer to. Especially when you're working with rough cuts of feature films which the masses would love to get an advance copy of.
Also if you have a client show up the last thing you want is a crashing computer.
Most of these people also have a laptop off to the side for internet.
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Now obviously the article part would need to be parsed by a reader of sorts. But you already create a site map usually so creating a link map for every page split by categories would be simple. Through voice command:
List Navigation:
"Top, Secions..."
List Navigation Top:
"Help and Preferences, Subscribe, Firehose.."
Go to Navigation, Top, Firehose.
or
Read Article.
I replied to another post but in essence. My DSL was out too. :|
:D
I ignored it for a week since my DSL was still working. Then I was out of town for 2 weeks. And I ignored it for another week when I got back because I was busy unpacking etc.
Dumbass. Who doesn't have DSL and Cable in case one or the other is flakey?
Well here is the full story:
My cable pings got above 300 regularly. So I switched to DSL. Just in case DSL ended up sucky I kept my Cable until I got the DSL all hooked up and happy. (If I cancel my Cable and need it back I know the backlogs are more than 3 weeks for installation).
DSL was installed and it immediately was plagued with outages (about 50% of the time it was down) but the pings when it was up were in the nice low 20s-40s. So what is a geek to do? Give up on his DSL low pings in exchange for consistant bandwidth and browsing or give up on gaming on weekends? It's a tough call, so I didn't make it hoping one or the other would stabilize.
My DSL was churning along quite happily all off a sudden and went an entire week without going out. So I started planning the death of my cable which is the time when it decides to die. I had switched some billing information about 2 months previously on it and the last time I had done that they didn't properly mark me down as "Autopay" and cut my cable for late payment. I'm thinking DSL seems to have cleared the pipes and is reliable I'll just call them next week and get it all sorted out and cancel all at the same time. Well a week later my DSL goes down. So of course the soonest non-business hours time they can come is the next weekend. (Myself still hoping this is a DSL issue that can be resolved once and for all giving me good internet waits until the weekend.) Weekend verdict (DSL Guy) "I can't fix it. I'm going to need to call someone else in but it won't be until sometime this week." (Still hoping that DSL will get working waits all week) No word from DSL company. Friday comes.
Me: "Someone 'else' was supposed to come out and fix my DSL. Still have no DSL."
QWest: "We have no record of someone scheduled to fix your DSL--it's listed as fixed and the support call was closed."
Me: "Well it's not and the guy said 'someone else is coming'."
(After 30 minutes on hold.)
QWest: "Turns out they have to dig up your line and they can't provide an eta because they need city approval."
The words "City Approval" make me reach for the cable company's phone number.
Broadstripe: "We can't get someone out on a saturday or sunday until the weekend after next and we can't fix it from here."
Me: "I'm leaving for New Zealand for 2 weeks next saturday it'll have to wait."
Broadstripe: "I'll just put a hold on your account until you get back. Have a nice trip."
I'm back now... and trying to deal with it.
DSL has yet to even start digging up the lines (But they did spray paint!). Broadstripe is being a smartass and Verizon is still 40 miles away (Which means at least 5 years by my reckoning).
Oh and I suppose there is also Clearwire WiMax but it's high latency, bad bandwidth and I live in a reception black hole.
God bless monopolies!
Big words for an Anonymous Coward. I bet that took you 5 minutes to work up the courage to post it!
Me: My Cable is Out. ... Pause as I assume this is the point where I'll get a scheduled service call...
Broadstripe: Sure enough it looks like there are several places in Seattle experiencing some outages. Crews are out. Is there anything else I can help you with.
Me: Yes. My Cable is out and I'm pretty sure that it's mostly unrelated to those outages. It's been out for a month. It was out yesterday. It was out the week before that. A cable guy came out to turn on my neighbor's cable... and the same day when I got home from work my internet was down.
Broadstripe: If the cable is out across parts of Seattle how can you conclude that your problem is unrelated.
Me: Because I assume that most of Seattle hasn't been without cable for a MONTH.
Broadstripe: We can send someone out between 9am and 6pm on Monday.
(Yeah sure I'll just take a day off from work to wait for the cable guy. Thanks but no thanks.)