I'm one of the network admins. We don't officially support Linux, but plenty of the techs in our department have good understanding of it and if you get the right person they'll be more than happy to help, provided you need that.

We do absolutely nothing to stop you from running whatever you want on our network, so long as you're not doing anything illegal. Our servers are pretty much a 50/50 mix of Linux/Windows and I can state for a fact that everything on the network works perfectly in Linux as I use Linux on my desktop at work.

Heck, we even unofficially support game consoles on the network. :)

This made me think of Wario Ware: Smooth Moves explaining the various forms.

I've done it in IE8. With Google as the search provider, it goes to Google. With Bing as the provider, it goes to Bing. With Yahoo as the provider, it goes to Yahoo... Hell, with eBay as the selected provider, it searches eBay. You get the picture.

Ah, yeah, that does make things easier on the user... I'm surprised though that they don't just do it based on the DOCSIS MAC, that way if you ever change the device plugged into the cable modem you don't have to opt out again. I guess that'd make too much sense for Comcast. :)

Exactly... This would be pretty awesome for games.

More likely the next time you get a new lease they assign you to different DNS servers which do not do this. Their DNS servers are not on the same subnet as the clients, so any form of MAC filtering at the DNS server level wouldn't work.

The cable modem's MAC address is actually a NIC, as expected, which runs a separate control stack on an internal to the ISP (10.x.x.x) range and has nothing at all to do with your actual network connectivity, so even if the DNS server was on the same network segment as you it wouldn't matter; the server be able to see your cable modem's MAC address, only your machine's address at best.

Cable ISPs run some extremely non-standard DHCP setups in which the cable modem's MAC address is used as the basis for giving out a lease to a different machine. How the internals of that work I'm not entirely sure, but I'd assume the modem hijacks DHCP requests out and either sends them over its control link or tags them with the modem's MAC.

I'm sure someone with more knowledge of how this works can elaborate further.

Ah, I never really fully looked into what Sky was doing with Boingo. That seems kind of pointless in a way.

Also, whoever modded me, please do explain how I was trolling.

Boingo is a company that was founded by the founder of Earthlink, Sky Dayton, back in 2001. His idea was to create a nationwide (and later global) network of hotspots, much like Wayport provides. It never took off. The USPTO is slow. Big deal, this isn't a patent troll company. It's a legitimate business that provides a very large network of hotspots. But of course this is Slashdot where nobody actually reads the article or researches what is being talked about and just jumps to conclusions.

Hell, he rented a house from my family out in California when he was starting this company and we got free Internet access from him in exchange for beta testing his service. Wayport has been around longer than Boingo, but didn't get into the wireless hotspot business until 2004. I really don't know what to make of this patent though.

True to an extent, but you do realize that Ken Rockwell's site is a satire, right?

I can do just about anything while looking through the viewfinder of my EOS-1D mkII. Once you know your way around the thing it's a breeze to work with. Then again, that's an entirely different league of cameras and I shoot professional sports, but I can maneuver around a consumer SLR about equally as fast as I can around my 1DII.

I know someone who constantly refers to VMWare Player as VTech. I installed it for him for a legacy DOS application he uses that wasn't working properly in XP.

http://www.boingboing.net/2008/06/05/entertainment-indust-1.html

RAWs are 12 or 14 bit memory dumps, a JPEG is a lossy 8 bit image. You'll be able to show artifacting in a fabricated RAW even from the best JPEG simply due to aliasing in the shading of each sensor. The reason you don't see software for converting to RAW is simply because RAW is not a standard, it's just a very loose term for a memory dump from a CMOS or CCD sensor after the second curtain closes. It varies from sensor to sensor and from firmware to firmware.

No joke, a Canon 1D Mark II (my camera) with 1.1.0 firmware produces a different RAW than a 1D II with firmware 1.2.6, and when you get a firmware update sometimes you have to wait for a patch to your converters.

The actual image is created using bayer interpolation, and while I suppose you could do some sort of reverse, it isn't exactly as straight forward cut and dry as it may seem. The output image really could be equated to a hash of the RAW, to put it simply.

Yes, what I meant was to a specific range of sensors. All of the 1D mark II sensors will produce the same format, but a 1D mark IIN will produce a different format, for example.