Another Kosh here. Didn't watch Babylon 5 so I don't know who that is.

And I must say bravo on the 2 media links today, also. Hilarious.

Mental note: Never, ever trust a review from Hardware-Review.net. That "Broadband Booster" review is just plain retarded.

1. The VoIP phone claims are just plain fiction.

During the second phase of testing, I added the Hawking broadband booster in between the cable modem and broadband router. I made the same call to Sacramento for 30 minutes for consistency purposes. Immediately, I noticed a much clearer connection and a significantly reduced amount of distortion and echoing.

Ok, this claim is simply rediculous. VoIP calls are DIGITAL. You speak into your handset, the audio is encoded by a hardware DSP into a digital format, the audio is broken up into packets, and the packets go out onto the network. By the time the audio packets get to the broadband router, the router CANNOT in any way possible affect echo and distortion. If there's echo and distortion, the DSP has introduced it, and there's no way in hell that this magic broadband booster is going to decode the packets and re-run some DSP echo-cancellation algorithms. Even if for some ungodly reason the device can do this, the audio degredation would be horrible. You know how you lose image quality when you encode a .jpg, decode it to some other format, and then re-encode it to .jpg again? Imagine doing that to super-compressed audio (G.711 at best; probably something similar to G.729 at worst) that already has a limited frequency response because of the digital encoding and probably crappy microphone. The claim the reviewer makes is downright false. If I met him on the street I'd call him a liar to his face.

It was immediately clear that the booster was doing its job and routing the data packets better than the router alone. Throughout the entire call, I noticed the voice quality was better, static was non-existent, and was very close to using a regular phone connection.

WTF???? The booster was routing data packets BETTER than the router alone? This guy has zero understanding of networking. Let's imagine this guy's network setup, which will be the exact same setup as anyone else's:

pc -> booster -> isp router -> hop -> ... -> hop -> dest

There's only ONE way out of your LAN, and that's to your ISP's router. That router sends the packet on its way to the next router, and so on until the packet gets to its destination. You can replace the booster with your own router, and there's absolutely NO difference in how the booster can route traffic. There's only one way out!

Ok, so let's say that the booster is routing traffic better by tagging all the packets with a high quality-of-service (QoS) level (the DSCP byte of the IP packet). Even if your LAN is configured for QoS, the second the packet leaves your LAN, all routers are allowed to IGNORE the quality level that you've marked your packet with. A general rule of thumb is that every router on the internet will IGNORE the quality-of-service byte so you will not get any increased performance by modifying the packet. Now if you were doing a call between 2 nodes on your own LAN, and your LAN was configured for quality-of-service, then yes, you could see better performance if there was a congestion problem on your LAN in the first place.

At BEST, the booster prioritizes your traffic so that it always sends VoIP traffic before any other outbound traffic. But to see the improvement your LAN connection would have to be completely saturated with traffic. You'd be better off getting a router than can do QoS then spending your money on this piece of junk.

I already addressed the claim that there was increased audio quality and "less static" when I talked about audio encoding.


2. For the remainder of the article the lying author dropped all pretext and didn't even try to make up stories about how the magical booster fixed his internet connection. All he did was show his ping and frame rate for a few games. THERE'S NO COMPARISON TO THE GAME WITHOUT THE BOOSTER! Why? Because the author didn't want to make the effort to fabricate fake screenshots, I'd imagine. Why the hell would the author show his frame rate, anyway? What the hell would the broadband booster have to do with how fast his CPU and video card can draw video frames?


Conclusion:

The reviewer is a liar and the product is probably a pass-through piece of junk. I'd love to get my hands on one of these devices and sniff the packet stream to find out what it really does, if anything.

I mean, one of the product features is that it enhances e-mail! E-MAIL! What the hell.

That review site is a piece of junk, and that product is quite likely a useless piece of plastic.

Microsoft said that Windows XP would NEVER crash! Applications might crash, but nothing would EVER bring down the entire OS.

Microsoft said that kernel-mode device drivers would never bring down the entire OS? Somehow I doubt that...

On the WinZip bit -- I just don't see the point honestly. They're fighting a losing battle IMO -- zip compatibility is built into Windows XP now and there's a ton of absolutely free programs out there that do as good (or better) than WinZip.

The problem is that all these other programs (including Windows XP integration) don't have the name WinZip. I'm amazed whenever I see people install WinZip as one of the first things when they reformat or get a new machine. I'm fairly certain it's just because of name recognition.

I have trouble believing that anyone would still fall for the ol' 127.0.0.1 trick these days...

I think they were saying that the guy gave the "hacker" his own actual IP, not necessarily 127.0.0.1.

(But yeah, I think there's no question that the story is completely fabricated)

A mystery bullet!

i think its like 10 years old dude

Yeah, but I think he's just saying that he lost his copy and can't find it.

yay!

Thought Thief 3 was a fine successor to the previous games. Didn't like DX2 much at all. Oh well, they had a decent run at any rate.

Bah! My Half-Life 2 account is down, but my Half-Life 1 account is up. I was hoping to test out my new gaming rig tonight, but oh well.

I was so completely sucked into the original Tribes, I'm suprised I haven't bought the new one yet.

I lived and breathed the original Tribes. Best multiplayer FPS ever. But yeah, I didn't buy the latest installment either. Guess the 2nd one turned me off for good.

I love the NVidia SLI review. SLI gets an 8/10. Except that the only game that showed a significant improvement was Doom3, and some of the other ones showed worse benchmarks with SLI! wtf? Although the benchmark improvements were significant, I would like to think that real-world performance accounts for more than 2 points.

What a terrible conclusion to draw from those horrid results.

(and kind of a bummer because I've already started putting together an SLI system...)

The justice system already chose not to lock him up.

Valastro refused to comment for this story. Speaking on his behalf, Sussman said the criminal justice system has already disciplined the teen, whose name is not being used because of his age and the low level of the charge. He pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor and will likely be sentenced next month to three years' probation and 50 hours of community service.

Hey guys, anyone else experience an issue where after clicking on any link on the site and then clicking back on your browser (IE, cough) the site reverts back to the page as it was on december 31st?

Yes, I get this behavior every once in a while. Last time I brought it up, Loonyboi (yes, it was that long ago) confirmed that Blue's site isn't going wonky. Chances are, that's still the case. I think my ISP is using a web proxy that sometimes doesn't update properly, which causes old pages to show. A refresh always fixes the problem when it happens to me.

And nin, just delete the junk after the "meat" of the URL instead of converting to tinyURL:

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0106880/

Happy new year to all. It's now nearly 4AM, and I just wasted a good 10 minutes of my life making this:

-26 fortnights until 2006? Hmmm...

Had me worried.

I was searching the news looking for an article about

"Gamers news site blues news raided by police. Servers confiscated on claims the site is providing training to terrorists via instructions and information on violent video game war simulators.

Dude!!! Don't you see what happened, JosephBlowski?!?????? The government took down Blue's site because they've intercepted your posts! They know that you know the truth, and they're trying to track you down!! They probably put some high-tech NSA device in Blue's server that will install a monitoring device on your PC---it probably has already!!! Once they collect enough evidence on you, they'll probably take you out. I know I'll draw their attention by posting this warning, but you better wipe your hard drive, move out of state, and tell Blue to remove all evidence of you from his server. Er, scratch that last one--it's probably already too late for Blue. He's already part of the coverup by saying it's simply a "hardware failure".

Good luck man.

Glad it's back up. I was reading forum posts when it crashed... Thought my internet connection went down. Shows how reliable this site always is otherwise.

The children of all ages putting together swear words get a bit tiring after a while.

And don't forget the inevitable dragging of all the letters into a single corner.

Perhaps it's time to fire that Bittorrent guy they hired and use the money to purchase a distribution deal with Filefront.