Comment Re:Sticking with Clementine (Score 1) 152
I should have mentioned that it was the Windows version (7.7.1).
did we learn nothing from Prohibition?
Yes, they learned that passing a constitutional amendment involves the participation of the People, who then realize that it's within their power to prevent that amendment (or indeed, revoke it after the fact). Note that when they restricted both guns and drugs soon after, they just ignored the Constitution and left the People out of the loop.
No. It's just an animal native to Japan. It really does have very large testicles.
This is true. And while I sometimes have trouble shopping for pants, it's worth being able to make tough decisions and stick with them.
However, capping the upload speed to something ridiculously low (10-30 k/sec) seems to fix the problem.
It makes me wonder if the upstream pipe is just saturated with all the connections made in the P2P network.
It's that, and the fact that higher upstream traffic causes higher (corresponding) downstream traffic. In fact, manipulating upstream traffic is exactly how linux QoS works. This is a very well-written guide:
http://tomatousb.org/tut:using-tomato-s-qos-system
You should look into getting a router that supports third-party linux firmware with QoS, like Tomato and TomatoUSB (not DDWRT, its QoS GUI (among other things) is long-broken with no fix in sight). Then you can not only cap your upstream traffic, but also give priority to certain traffic (such as DNS, HTTP, IRC, POP, IMAP, etc.) so that your internet connection is always responsive no matter what you're doing.
It's true that the subjects don't have to be in on it, not all of them anyway. What's astounding is how little actual content it takes.
Top Gear faked an attack (rock-throwing) at an Alabama gas station, and convinced a lot of people that it really happened. They did it without showing a single attacker throwing a rock, without showing a single attacker threatening them, really without even showing a single attacker's face.
And if today you asked the people who were fooled by it years ago, I'm sure most would say they saw all those things.
. . . a Storage Review experiment from over a year ago:
http://www.storagereview.com/western_digital_velociraptors_raid_ssd_alternative
They put WD Raptors in RAID 0 to form a high performance (yet still affordable) platter drive setup, and then faced them off against Western Digital's new (at the time, first) SSD. Makes sense, right? Except that WD's first SSD was a complete joke, an underperforming, laughably expensive POS that I forgot about a couple days after Anand's review. When I first read about it I couldn't help but think that WD was deliberately setting it up to fail. It was at the bottom of every benchmark yet priced higher than any other (MLC) SSD. They even put a jmicron controller in it for fuck's sake (not the infamous original one, but still . .
Even so, this supposedly screaming platter drive setup could only occasionally hang with the bottom of the barrell of SSDs, and mostly lagged behind it. And as I said, this was over a year ago. It goes without saying that they didn't worry much about heat, noise, reliability (of RAID 0), or power consumption.
Anand doesn't even list platter drives in his benchmark results anymore because they'd skew the charts so badly.
As a previous poster said, a winning strategy is to get a SSD boot drive just big enough for your OS and programs, and use platter drives for everything else. And since the SSD takes care of your performance needs, you can get the cheapest, slowest, coolest, quietest platter drives. There are some cases where both high performance and high capacity are needed at once (like video editing) but they're not the norm.
. . . imagine if the Ubisoft always-on DRM were an inherent, unremoveable aspect of the game system rather than just something tacked on to a few individual games after the fact, such that Ubisoft couldn't even begrudgingly neuter it in a patch. Well, Onlive is even worse than that would be.
The game doesn't even run remotely. All you get is streaming video/audio and all the lag you'd expect (including controller lag), which is a recipe for disaster in North America.
Let's say you're lucky enough to have a 30mb/s connection. Why would you want to use it to transfer your game's video instead of, uh, a DVI cable, which is capable of 4 Gb/s? The people who developed DVI apparently understood that that 1920 x 1200 pixels w/ 24 bits/pixels @ 60Hz results in bandwidth well over 3 Gb/s. The people who developed Onlive seem very, very confused (at best).
Some people consider IPS monitors unsuitable for games requiring fast reflexes (i.e. FPSes) due to their double-digit response times. Internet latency is often worse and certainly more unpredictable than LCD monitor response time, and with Onlive it applies to audio and keyboard/controller/etc input too.
Those of us who know anything about bandwidth and compression and (especially) latency can see the enormous technical obstacles facing a service like this, and Onlive has never done anything to explain how they intend to solve them. Instead, they've done everything they can to lock out independent reviewers with NDAs and closed demonstrations. A friend of mine described it as the gaming equivalent of the perpetual motion scam, and IMO that's spot on (except that Onlive would still have the draconian DRM issues even if it worked perfectly)..
BTW, you pay a monthly fee for the service and then you STILL have to "buy" the games (which of course become useless if your subscription lapses, giving them another leash to choke you with). I'm not kidding.
Onlive appears designed from the ground up to benefit the game publishers and fuck the customers, exactly what you'd expect from any DRM system.
I haven't heard many people going to a DVD-only plan. Most people were planning on canceling, or doing the streaming plan +Redbox. Does this change anyone's plans?
I went to DVD-only after the latest price hike (which turned out to be a cut for me). I posted here about it (accidentally as AC) here:
http://entertainment.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2341822&cid=36843532
I never cared much about streaming, only DVDs, so for me this amounts to a price cut of $4/month (and gives me an idea of how much I've been paying for the streaming I never wanted). Here's the email I got (I'm on the 3 at a time plan for $20/mo).
We are separating unlimited DVDs by mail and unlimited streaming into two separate plans to better reflect the costs of each. Now our members have a choice: a streaming only plan, a DVD only plan, or both.
Your current $19.99 a month membership for unlimited streaming and unlimited DVDs will be split into 2 distinct plans:
Plan 1: Unlimited Streaming (no DVDs) for $7.99 a month
Plan 2: Unlimited DVDs, 3 out at-a-time (no streaming) for $15.99 a month
Your price for getting both of these plans will be $23.98 a month ($7.99 + $15.99). You don't need to do anything to continue your memberships for both unlimited streaming and unlimited DVDs.
These prices will start for charges on or after September 1, 2011.
My take on it is that due to the threats to net neutrality (ISP bandwidth caps and MAFIAA), Netflix's streaming business is getting squeezed all around. Its costs are rising and there's every reason to believe things are going to get even worse in the future.
By all rights, streaming should cost almost nothing compared to mailing physical DVDs. Netflix's original plan was to piggyback (i.e. force) streaming onto everyone's DVD plan, under the assumption that the more DVD rentals it rendered unnecessary, the better. Eventually it might have even become Netfix's primary business.
But streaming is probably becoming so expensive that this piggybacking isn't viable anymore. They know they have to raise prices on the bundled plans, and that makes two price hikes in one year (my plan was $17/mo until February). Customers will scream bloody murder over that, so in an attempt to lessen the fallout they're separating the two services, limiting the (perceived) price hike by allowing customers to pay for only what they use. This means neither DVD-only nor streaming-only folks have to subsidize the other side so much anymore, but the tradeoff is that there's no longer any money to be saved by bundling. So the customers hurt the most are those who use both services, and I bet this really sticks in Netflix's craw because those are exactly the kind of customers they've always wanted to attract (and create) the most.
"When the going gets tough, the tough get empirical." -- Jon Carroll
