Where I am I can't get local channels from DSS so I was reduced to having to receive the major networks over the air with an antenna and the reception is horrid. I simply do not fucking agree with their reasons, which seem to come down to certain people and companies believing they are entitled to as much revenue stream as possible. Blah., fuck that. So I tried everything I could think of to get the locals, I tried telling them I lived in a city that got locals, doesn't work because they use spot beams, I tried convincing the guy on the phone to 'just hook it up', and I tried sending letters to the networks to get them to allow me to receive their signal on DSS (something the directTV rep will tell you to try, no doubt just to get your off of their back since it doesn't work)
After all of that I then stumbled across alt.dss.hack and therein lies your answer. There is a huge hacking scene for satellite tv that involves cheap equipment and freeware and even smart card emulation running on commodity pc hardware. I now receive every channel on directTV including the network, premiums, PPV's and all the sports, porn, etc.. etc.. all for nothing. I don't even bother keeping a small basic subcription. Ha! Take that fuckers.
All of this press couldn't be helping their case. I saw the WC3 beta posted somewhere, but I didn't bother downloading it thinking I couldn't play it without a valid key anyway.. now that I know about this bnetd project I've rethought my position.. wonder if that post is still there...
We weren't talking about ISP tech support. The vast majority of the calls you get are Internet related, almost all of which are easily solvable.
Funny you should mention that, since this computer repair shop where I work is also a computer store and an ISP. I started as the computer repair guy but now I'm the Network Administrator and I spent my time as ISP phone support as well.
Trust me, ISP calls are far, far easier than computer repair center calls.
"That's not really *support* for the problem. IMHO it's a last resort. Not something that Dell, HP, home-user-OEM should be using all of the time."
Unfortunately, a nuke and reinstall is about the only option in most cases. Typically a user calls and says "My computer is locking up..."
Oh boy, good luck figuring that out Mr. phone tech support guy. Even if you can trace it down to a single program over the phone, you're probably just fixing a symptom caused by another problem.
The truth of the matter is, a lot of problems can be solved eventually, but -very few- of them can be solved with less than having an on site tech working for a few hours, and that sort of support simply isn't reasonable to expect from consumer level equipment. If you want that sort of service then go to your local computer repair place and pay for it.
And I'll be honest here, I work in a computer repair shop, and more and more often we are seeing machines come in that simply can't be fixed short of a reinstall. It's gone from maybe 10% to i'd say around 40% in the past 3 years. Windows is just getting worse and worse all the time.
Well maybe you should try replacing your sound system with some new harddrives.
*laugh*
No seriously, the sounds recognizable and its a pretty impressive technical feat. Honestly though, I'd like to see a vibrator speaker system as well. Maybe it would turn on some women to new types of music.. omg.. stop me now.
Yeah you definately wouldn't want to be using a mouse like that for gaming. In fact, even using an optical mouse isn't a good thing if you are competing at the world level.
What you will find if you look into the Pro gamer community (this might sound like I'm kidding, but it really exists: http://www.shackes.com) is that most of them do not like optical mice. They simply don't have high enough sampling rate in most cases. If you turn fast enough with an optical then tend to freak out for a second resulting in your player staring at the floor or sky and spinning. Also, the movements and physics of using an optical are somewhat different. For instance the 'flick' motion that a lot of players have mastered doesn't translate well to an optical.
Opticals are nice because of their longevity, and low maintenance, but if you're seriuos then ball is still king.
"If the people who designed and wrote the software can't find the bugs, what makes you think that throwing somebody at it in their spare cycles is going to help? We want software that works, so we can do our business. Our business is not writing this software."
Well that sounds good, but it's been proven wrong in practice.
At this point, with all of the incredible software that has been produced by open source methods, I don't think it leaves people much room to attack the open source design philosophy. It clearly works and works well, it just works differently than people expect.
A lot of people think that because you did all of this work for your item in game then you should be able to do what you want with it, and there is something to be said for that. Unfortuantely in the grand scheme of things it's not so simple. A problem arises when a lucrative market springs up, then you have people who use the game as a means to make their living in the real life.We call these item farmers. These people are a problem for the game system because they spend vast amounts of times gathering items and resources in the game beyond what their character could possibly want or need. These items are of limited availability (they all drop on spawn timers or on a rare percentage of monster kills) so this results in the actual players of the game being pushed out. This of course works for the item farmer because it helps to create the market.
Creating and then maintaining a sustainable economy is a very difficult thing to do in an MMORPG (indeed, nobody has done it yet) and item farmers just make it more difficult.
Well thats pretty neat, albeit very intrusive. I think it goes without saying that this is a long way off from being used with human patients, but maybe some day.
One thing that has occured to me, and you're going to think I'm nuts, but I wonder if this would improve my q3 accuracy. No.. but seriously.. it might...
It's been attempted multiple times, and what was found out was that CVS makes things even more chaotic as more people gradually gain commit, as a consequence, all of the CVS kernel forks died.
The real solution, as Linus has pointed out, is that everyone has a small group of trusted people who they take patches from for a given subsystem. What you end up with is Linus at the top with his 10 or so trusted people below him each responsible for submitting patches for large subsections of the kernel, and those guys accept patches from other maintainers who again are in charge of yet smaller subsections within the previous. This type of tree can handle very complex projects and scale very well provided everything is designed modularly with -good interfaces- (another point that Linus has been trying to drive home). So what Linus wants to see happen is that people -stop sending him patches directly- and start sending them to subsection maintainers.
Now the good news. You couldn't tell it by this Slashdot post but everything I have just said has already been happening. People are moving over to the new system and things are getting worked out, the reason you still see posts like this is that some people just haven't quite worked their way into the new system yet. So yes, it's a problem and it's one that is already being solved, no need to panic.
To quote Linus: "If you can't get a patch through to me find someone else you can go through."
That statement alone will go a long way towards making the reorganization happen.
Heh, what the hell are we supposed to say to this? Ok sure, yeah you can train in one field and go into another, in fact it's not even that uncommon, but what do you want me to tell you to do it that way on purpose? I don't think so.
Generally speaking, you should try to major in the field you intend to make a career out of.
I don't think I like that type of behavior. Although due process doesn't always work, we have it for a reason. Sure in a few isolated and clear cut cases like this it's easy for all of us to look at it and say "Well they got the bad guy, good for them.", but at the same time the mob mentality something like this can foster isn't pretty. What if they had fingered the wrong guy, what could have been done? You can be sure you wouldn't have been able to convince them otherwise.
This is embarassing to the Linux community as a whole, and It also explains why I've had problems with crashes on two different systems running Linux and Athlons.
What I don't understand is how this could have made it so far? This is exactly the sort of problem I have been telling people we don't have in the Linux world, and now it looks like I was wrong. Is this pointing out an underlying problem we have with QA in the Linux kernel? With Open Source in general? What can we do to make sure that a bugs of this magnitude are detected more quickly?
After the SBLive! fiasco, I'd be careful.
For those of you who don't remember, the SBLive! from Creative had a lot of problems with a lot of different configurations. They tended to saturate the PCI bus and broke the PCI2 standard resulting in compatibility issues with all kinds of other devices, including motherboards with "independant" chipsets like Via.
I hope they have a better approach for their USB design. The last thing I need is a soundcard that upsets the rest of my USB devices.
If a person makes it to college and they are -still- a social misfit, then I don't think college is going to do them any good. By that time your degree of social interaction is pretty much set.
Lets ignore the fact that learning effective communication and basic social skills isn't actually what college is for, and say that if management requires that the employees have some kind of degree in human communication then what the hell good is management? I thought their whole purpose was to MANAGE people so that they can make use of the persons skills.
If the company -needs- someone who can code drivers
for old crappy hardware, then they should hire the person they can find with those skills and then acommodate them so that they can get the needed work out of them.
I think that the real problem is the huge number of managers who forget the purpose of the business is to make money and instead think they are there making the picture perfect workplace, straight out of Office Space.
I'm sick of half of my fucking traffic going into oblivion because all P2P people leaving 5 different P2P clients running all the time.
I don't have anything against P2P, and I could care less what people do with it... right up until it starts to effect the quality of my service. Sure I can bitch and moan that the ISP's aren't adding more bandwidth as it's needed, but I'm sure that no matter how much was added the P2P monkeys would just suck it all up anyway. As it is, running at 50% PL nonstop all day is fucking bs, and if they have to block all P2P software to get that to stop then I'll live with it. I can go back to getting my porn and mp3s from usenet and irc.
Back in my day, we didn't have any fancy assed Napster or Morpheus, we had to use rn to save the files then stitch them together and pipe it to uudecode, so don't come bitching to me when you have to scan Usenet for your porn using your automagic binary grabber/combiner/decoder, because you don't know how good you have it.
I guess thats one way to do it.. but when I was a child I made my christmas lights blink in time to my stereo by just cutting the wires and then plugging it in to my second speaker channels on my stereo.
It worked and the overall brightness matched how loud I was playing the music.. heh.. hrm.. wonder if I was hurting anything...
Uh.. you mean ICMP I think. Widespread blocking of UDP isn't something I've noticed. That would suck considering 90% of the games people are playing online are UDP.
I have this service and recently switched to the new server. Most of the binary groups are indeed gone but not all of them. You would think that they would turn off the ones that had the most traffic or maybe didn't specialize in pirated material, but that doesn't seem to be the case.
I'm seeing groups missing like the entire alt.binaries.multimedia.erotica.* heirarchy, which isn't suprising since those groups have huge amounts of traffic, but other groups that also have huge amounts of traffic still remain.
For instance, right now I'm seeing these groups still available:
alt.binaries.games
alt.binaries.vcd
alt.binaries.divx
All of which are 99% pirated material and all of which are extremely high volume groups.
I wonder if maybe someone at SBC has an interest in free movies and games. Who sets the standard?
Well yes it does, but it wouldn't be right now would it? Regardless of whether or not you agree that the NYT should be requiring a registration, if the NYT wants to make sure people register to read their article then linking to the article that requires registration is just the polite thing to do.
The drugs alter your perception of reality. Specifically amphetamines tend to make you enjoy yourself. If you get this effect while playing guitar you will very much enjoy your musical abilities, thus thinking you play better.
"But I swear dude, I play better high!" heh.. yeah, right.
I work for a small ISP in SE Kansas and I've seen firsthand how difficult it is to compete. In my market SWBell wanted to charge us $29 per head to sell DSL to customers in our area. After that I still have to pay normal ISP costs associated with bandwidth, customer support, in addition to end user equipment. We were prepared to do this a full year before SWBell was going to come in and offer DSL in our area because the equipment was already there waiting to be used. Our plan was to offer dynamic IP's at a base service and then sell static IP's for a few dollars more. We would have had a reasonable upload cap of 384 ot 768, somewherein that area. We really had a good service planned, but we found out through a few contacts that SWBell was going to have a special when they offered DSL. $35 per month plus free equipment. We did the math and realized there was no way we could compete with that, so we didn't bother.
I don't see how they can justify charging us $29 per head for JUST the local loop and then selling the entire service for $35 themselves, but thats what they did.
In January we found out that prices have risen to $49 a month and there are no longer deals on equipment.
Now we see they have been doing this all over the country. The operating proceedure seems to be price the competition out of the market and then raise prices.
In the end everybody loses but SWBell. I don't know what the deal is with this, but I wish someone would have done something.
Slashdot Mirror
Where I am I can't get local channels from DSS so I was reduced to having to receive the major networks over the air with an antenna and the reception is horrid. I simply do not fucking agree with their reasons, which seem to come down to certain people and companies believing they are entitled to as much revenue stream as possible. Blah., fuck that. So I tried everything I could think of to get the locals, I tried telling them I lived in a city that got locals, doesn't work because they use spot beams, I tried convincing the guy on the phone to 'just hook it up', and I tried sending letters to the networks to get them to allow me to receive their signal on DSS (something the directTV rep will tell you to try, no doubt just to get your off of their back since it doesn't work)
After all of that I then stumbled across alt.dss.hack and therein lies your answer. There is a huge hacking scene for satellite tv that involves cheap equipment and freeware and even smart card emulation running on commodity pc hardware. I now receive every channel on directTV including the network, premiums, PPV's and all the sports, porn, etc.. etc.. all for nothing. I don't even bother keeping a small basic subcription.
Ha! Take that fuckers.
other sites you might check for info:
Kayo
dssfreeware
Pirates Den
----------
Well.. ok, but I run a mail server for an ISP with about 1900 email accounts on a dual p3 machine that costs me about $1500.
All of this press couldn't be helping their case. I saw the WC3 beta posted somewhere, but I didn't bother downloading it thinking I couldn't play it without a valid key anyway.. now that I know about this bnetd project I've rethought my position.. wonder if that post is still there...
We weren't talking about ISP tech support. The vast majority of the calls you get are Internet related, almost all of which are easily solvable.
Funny you should mention that, since this computer repair shop where I work is also a computer store and an ISP. I started as the computer repair guy but now I'm the Network Administrator and I spent my time as ISP phone support as well.
Trust me, ISP calls are far, far easier than computer repair center calls.
"That's not really *support* for the problem. IMHO it's a last resort. Not something that Dell, HP, home-user-OEM should be using all of the time."
Unfortunately, a nuke and reinstall is about the only option in most cases. Typically a user calls and says "My computer is locking up..."
Oh boy, good luck figuring that out Mr. phone tech support guy. Even if you can trace it down to a single program over the phone, you're probably just fixing a symptom caused by another problem.
The truth of the matter is, a lot of problems can be solved eventually, but -very few- of them can be solved with less than having an on site tech working for a few hours, and that sort of support simply isn't reasonable to expect from consumer level equipment. If you want that sort of service then go to your local computer repair place and pay for it.
And I'll be honest here, I work in a computer repair shop, and more and more often we are seeing machines come in that simply can't be fixed short of a reinstall. It's gone from maybe 10% to i'd say around 40% in the past 3 years. Windows is just getting worse and worse all the time.
Well maybe you should try replacing your sound system with some new harddrives.
*laugh*
No seriously, the sounds recognizable and its a pretty impressive technical feat. Honestly though, I'd like to see a vibrator speaker system as well. Maybe it would turn on some women to new types of music.. omg.. stop me now.
Yeah you definately wouldn't want to be using a mouse like that for gaming. In fact, even using an optical mouse isn't a good thing if you are competing at the world level.
What you will find if you look into the Pro gamer community (this might sound like I'm kidding, but it really exists: http://www.shackes.com) is that most of them do not like optical mice. They simply don't have high enough sampling rate in most cases. If you turn fast enough with an optical then tend to freak out for a second resulting in your player staring at the floor or sky and spinning. Also, the movements and physics of using an optical are somewhat different. For instance the 'flick' motion that a lot of players have mastered doesn't translate well to an optical.
Opticals are nice because of their longevity, and low maintenance, but if you're seriuos then ball is still king.
"If the people who designed and wrote the software can't find the bugs, what makes you think that throwing somebody at it in their spare cycles is going to help? We want software that works, so we can do our business. Our business is not writing this software."
Well that sounds good, but it's been proven wrong in practice.
At this point, with all of the incredible software that has been produced by open source methods, I don't think it leaves people much room to attack the open source design philosophy. It clearly works and works well, it just works differently than people expect.
A lot of people think that because you did all of this work for your item in game then you should be able to do what you want with it, and there is something to be said for that. Unfortuantely in the grand scheme of things it's not so simple. A problem arises when a lucrative market springs up, then you have people who use the game as a means to make their living in the real life.We call these item farmers. These people are a problem for the game system because they spend vast amounts of times gathering items and resources in the game beyond what their character could possibly want or need. These items are of limited availability (they all drop on spawn timers or on a rare percentage of monster kills) so this results in the actual players of the game being pushed out. This of course works for the item farmer because it helps to create the market.
Creating and then maintaining a sustainable economy is a very difficult thing to do in an MMORPG (indeed, nobody has done it yet) and item farmers just make it more difficult.
Well thats pretty neat, albeit very intrusive. I think it goes without saying that this is a long way off from being used with human patients, but maybe some day.
One thing that has occured to me, and you're going to think I'm nuts, but I wonder if this would improve my q3 accuracy. No.. but seriously.. it might...
It's been attempted multiple times, and what was found out was that CVS makes things even more chaotic as more people gradually gain commit, as a consequence, all of the CVS kernel forks died.
The real solution, as Linus has pointed out, is that everyone has a small group of trusted people who they take patches from for a given subsystem. What you end up with is Linus at the top with his 10 or so trusted people below him each responsible for submitting patches for large subsections of the kernel, and those guys accept patches from other maintainers who again are in charge of yet smaller subsections within the previous. This type of tree can handle very complex projects and scale very well provided everything is designed modularly with -good interfaces- (another point that Linus has been trying to drive home). So what Linus wants to see happen is that people -stop sending him patches directly- and start sending them to subsection maintainers.
Now the good news. You couldn't tell it by this Slashdot post but everything I have just said has already been happening. People are moving over to the new system and things are getting worked out, the reason you still see posts like this is that some people just haven't quite worked their way into the new system yet. So yes, it's a problem and it's one that is already being solved, no need to panic.
To quote Linus: "If you can't get a patch through to me find someone else you can go through."
That statement alone will go a long way towards making the reorganization happen.
Heh, what the hell are we supposed to say to this? Ok sure, yeah you can train in one field and go into another, in fact it's not even that uncommon, but what do you want me to tell you to do it that way on purpose? I don't think so.
Generally speaking, you should try to major in the field you intend to make a career out of.
I don't think I like that type of behavior. Although due process doesn't always work, we have it for a reason. Sure in a few isolated and clear cut cases like this it's easy for all of us to look at it and say "Well they got the bad guy, good for them.", but at the same time the mob mentality something like this can foster isn't pretty. What if they had fingered the wrong guy, what could have been done? You can be sure you wouldn't have been able to convince them otherwise.
This is embarassing to the Linux community as a whole, and It also explains why I've had problems with crashes on two different systems running Linux and Athlons.
What I don't understand is how this could have made it so far? This is exactly the sort of problem I have been telling people we don't have in the Linux world, and now it looks like I was wrong. Is this pointing out an underlying problem we have with QA in the Linux kernel? With Open Source in general? What can we do to make sure that a bugs of this magnitude are detected more quickly?
After the SBLive! fiasco, I'd be careful.
For those of you who don't remember, the SBLive! from Creative had a lot of problems with a lot of different configurations. They tended to saturate the PCI bus and broke the PCI2 standard resulting in compatibility issues with all kinds of other devices, including motherboards with "independant" chipsets like Via.
I hope they have a better approach for their USB design. The last thing I need is a soundcard that upsets the rest of my USB devices.
Blah blah, here we go with the cliches.
If a person makes it to college and they are -still- a social misfit, then I don't think college is going to do them any good. By that time your degree of social interaction is pretty much set.
Lets ignore the fact that learning effective communication and basic social skills isn't actually what college is for, and say that if management requires that the employees have some kind of degree in human communication then what the hell good is management? I thought their whole purpose was to MANAGE people so that they can make use of the persons skills.
If the company -needs- someone who can code drivers
for old crappy hardware, then they should hire the person they can find with those skills and then acommodate them so that they can get the needed work out of them.
I think that the real problem is the huge number of managers who forget the purpose of the business is to make money and instead think they are there making the picture perfect workplace, straight out of Office Space.
Did you get me those TPS reports?
It'll stop when the packetloss stops.
I'm sick of half of my fucking traffic going into oblivion because all P2P people leaving 5 different P2P clients running all the time.
I don't have anything against P2P, and I could care less what people do with it... right up until it starts to effect the quality of my service. Sure I can bitch and moan that the ISP's aren't adding more bandwidth as it's needed, but I'm sure that no matter how much was added the P2P monkeys would just suck it all up anyway. As it is, running at 50% PL nonstop all day is fucking bs, and if they have to block all P2P software to get that to stop then I'll live with it. I can go back to getting my porn and mp3s from usenet and irc.
Back in my day, we didn't have any fancy assed Napster or Morpheus, we had to use rn to save the files then stitch them together and pipe it to uudecode, so don't come bitching to me when you have to scan Usenet for your porn using your automagic binary grabber/combiner/decoder, because you don't know how good you have it.
I guess thats one way to do it.. but when I was a child I made my christmas lights blink in time to my stereo by just cutting the wires and then plugging it in to my second speaker channels on my stereo.
It worked and the overall brightness matched how loud I was playing the music.. heh.. hrm.. wonder if I was hurting anything...
Uh.. you mean ICMP I think. Widespread blocking of UDP isn't something I've noticed. That would suck considering 90% of the games people are playing online are UDP.
I doubt you can get a 1600 series router with a DSL or Cable enabled WIC for under $300 even off of Ebay.
I have this service and recently switched to the new server. Most of the binary groups are indeed gone but not all of them. You would think that they would turn off the ones that had the most traffic or maybe didn't specialize in pirated material, but that doesn't seem to be the case.
I'm seeing groups missing like the entire alt.binaries.multimedia.erotica.* heirarchy, which isn't suprising since those groups have huge amounts of traffic, but other groups that also have huge amounts of traffic still remain.
For instance, right now I'm seeing these groups still available:
alt.binaries.games
alt.binaries.vcd
alt.binaries.divx
All of which are 99% pirated material and all of which are extremely high volume groups.
I wonder if maybe someone at SBC has an interest in free movies and games. Who sets the standard?
Well yes it does, but it wouldn't be right now would it? Regardless of whether or not you agree that the NYT should be requiring a registration, if the NYT wants to make sure people register to read their article then linking to the article that requires registration is just the polite thing to do.
The drugs alter your perception of reality. Specifically amphetamines tend to make you enjoy yourself. If you get this effect while playing guitar you will very much enjoy your musical abilities, thus thinking you play better. "But I swear dude, I play better high!" heh.. yeah, right.
I work for a small ISP in SE Kansas and I've seen firsthand how difficult it is to compete. In my market SWBell wanted to charge us $29 per head to sell DSL to customers in our area. After that I still have to pay normal ISP costs associated with bandwidth, customer support, in addition to end user equipment. We were prepared to do this a full year before SWBell was going to come in and offer DSL in our area because the equipment was already there waiting to be used. Our plan was to offer dynamic IP's at a base service and then sell static IP's for a few dollars more. We would have had a reasonable upload cap of 384 ot 768, somewherein that area. We really had a good service planned, but we found out through a few contacts that SWBell was going to have a special when they offered DSL. $35 per month plus free equipment. We did the math and realized there was no way we could compete with that, so we didn't bother.
I don't see how they can justify charging us $29 per head for JUST the local loop and then selling the entire service for $35 themselves, but thats what they did.
In January we found out that prices have risen to $49 a month and there are no longer deals on equipment.
Now we see they have been doing this all over the country. The operating proceedure seems to be price the competition out of the market and then raise prices.
In the end everybody loses but SWBell. I don't know what the deal is with this, but I wish someone would have done something.
Webbrowsing is faster on Macs, I've tested it myself! *
*(Webbrowsing in this case being downloading the html and images files and then drawing the output by hand in Photoshop.