How about cable? There's no technical reason for asymmetric cable connections, yet they all want an arm and a leg and your first born son to get anything. Maybe upload bandwith costs them more, but I can't believe it's at all proportionate. There has to be some motivation for them so harshly discouraging uploads.
But there are technical reasons. Cablemodems use 256QAM (Quarature Amplitude Modulation) to modulate the data on the cable line. For both upstream and downstream, there are multiple channels, but there are many more downstream channels than upstream. All of the downstream channels are in the 700MHz band. The upstream channels are all around 20MHz, because it takes less power to send a signal the same distance at 20MHz than 700MHz. Due to being such a low frequency, the wavelength is larger, and you can't encode as many QAM symbols per second as you can with a shorter wavelength that you would have at 700MHz. My cablemodem is currently using cablemodem upstream channel 6, which is at 23.750MHz and has a QAM symbol rate of 2.56 million symbols per second. That means that it would theoretically be able to achieve 18Mbit/s on the upstream. My downstream is on 741.0MHz, which has a max symbol rate of 5.360537Msym/s, which means a theoretical throughput of 38.811Mbit/s. But that is without sharing with other modems on the same frequencies.
You know, I swear I heard in interviews, and perhaps saw on their website somewhere, that, with Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within, they were attempting to make it look as photorealistic as possible.
If I could remember where I encountered this, I would provide links.
While the CGI in this movie was outstanding, it still lacked some items that made it not quite photorealistic. One of the things is translucency. The people in FFTSW still looked somewhat plastic, because they lacked translucency.
Now the CGI in Matrix Reloaded, on the other hand, lacked MANY qualities, and looks like they used plastic figures for things...
Most ISPs use access servers from companies like Cisco and Bay. Access servers are (usually) rack-mountable cases with a bunch of modem hardware in one small box. (see Cisco's Access servers page for info about access servers.
any ISP that offers 56Kbps will definetly have one of these access servers.
yep. I used to work for a company where the software group got brand-new Dell Inspiron 7000 laptops. The first thing IS did was wipe the hard drive on the first one, install NT4, set it up with everything, then Ghost it to an image.
Then they get the next laptop out, and restore the Ghost image to its hard drive. Needless to say, around half of the laptops ended up having everything wiped out and reinstalled, since they kept having strange problems that the IS dept. couldn't figure out.
My mom has a Dell Inspiron 7000 laptop with DVD and Lexonar HW decoder. when she tried to watch the disk, it wanted her to install PCFriendly, which she did. then, the DVD program that came with the laptop ceased working. put in any DVD, and the Dell player starts up but won't play the disk. even after "uninstalling" PCFriendly and re-installing the dell program, it still won't run properly. now she's got to use the PCFriendly player to watch any disk.
what a pain. Probably the only way to get it to work right again is to wipe the machine clean and use the rescue disk.
How about cable? There's no technical reason for asymmetric cable connections, yet they all want an arm and a leg and your first born son to get anything. Maybe upload bandwith costs them more, but I can't believe it's at all proportionate. There has to be some motivation for them so harshly discouraging uploads.
But there are technical reasons. Cablemodems use 256QAM (Quarature Amplitude Modulation) to modulate the data on the cable line. For both upstream and downstream, there are multiple channels, but there are many more downstream channels than upstream. All of the downstream channels are in the 700MHz band. The upstream channels are all around 20MHz, because it takes less power to send a signal the same distance at 20MHz than 700MHz. Due to being such a low frequency, the wavelength is larger, and you can't encode as many QAM symbols per second as you can with a shorter wavelength that you would have at 700MHz. My cablemodem is currently using cablemodem upstream channel 6, which is at 23.750MHz and has a QAM symbol rate of 2.56 million symbols per second. That means that it would theoretically be able to achieve 18Mbit/s on the upstream. My downstream is on 741.0MHz, which has a max symbol rate of 5.360537Msym/s, which means a theoretical throughput of 38.811Mbit/s. But that is without sharing with other modems on the same frequencies.
You know, I swear I heard in interviews, and perhaps saw on their website somewhere, that, with Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within, they were attempting to make it look as photorealistic as possible.
If I could remember where I encountered this, I would provide links.
While the CGI in this movie was outstanding, it still lacked some items that made it not quite photorealistic. One of the things is translucency. The people in FFTSW still looked somewhat plastic, because they lacked translucency.
Now the CGI in Matrix Reloaded, on the other hand, lacked MANY qualities, and looks like they used plastic figures for things...
ISDN comes in 2 flavors:
- BRI (Basic Rate Interface), which is 2 data channels, and a (smaller) control channel, which maxes out at about 128kbps
- PRI (Primary Rate Interface), which has 23 data channels and 1 control channel of the same size. PRI bandwidth is just slightly lower than a T1.
Most ISPs use access servers from companies like Cisco and Bay. Access servers are (usually) rack-mountable cases with a bunch of modem hardware in one small box. (see Cisco's Access servers page for info about access servers.
any ISP that offers 56Kbps will definetly have one of these access servers.
A former employer had the development team skip 13 and go right to 14 when numbering versions/pre-releases...
of course, the pre-releases were for the internal qa team to check for bugs before releasing...
If you want to see something really funny/disturbing, do a whois on lucasfilm.
This may be getting off topic a bit further, but Andover, being a network provider, gets (and does have) a .net name.
I remember a quote from Paul Harvey:
"Gonads are useful for their purpose, but they are no substitute for brains."
really!
here is a sound clip.
yep. I used to work for a company where the software group got brand-new Dell Inspiron 7000 laptops. The first thing IS did was wipe the hard drive on the first one, install NT4, set it up with everything, then Ghost it to an image.
Then they get the next laptop out, and restore the Ghost image to its hard drive. Needless to say, around half of the laptops ended up having everything wiped out and reinstalled, since they kept having strange problems that the IS dept. couldn't figure out.
My mom has a Dell Inspiron 7000 laptop with DVD and Lexonar HW decoder. when she tried to watch the disk, it wanted her to install PCFriendly, which she did. then, the DVD program that came with the laptop ceased working. put in any DVD, and the Dell player starts up but won't play the disk. even after "uninstalling" PCFriendly and re-installing the dell program, it still won't run properly. now she's got to use the PCFriendly player to watch any disk.
what a pain. Probably the only way to get it to work right again is to wipe the machine clean and use the rescue disk.
(btw, yes it runs Win98.)