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He's alternately praised for having a rock solid back beat you couldn't move with a cran and then for not keeping metronome time but keeping with the feel of the song here:

http://web2.airmail.net/gshultz/drumpage.html

George Martin -- "Ringo always got and still gets a unique sound out of his drums, as sound as distinctive as his voice. ... Ringo gets a looser deeper sound out of his drums that is unique. ...This detailed attention to the tone of his drums is one of the reasons for Ringo's brilliance. Another is that although Ringo does not keep time with a metronome accuracy, he has unrivaled feel for a song. If his timing fluctuates, it invariably does so in the right place at the right time, keep the right atmosphere going on the track and give it a rock solid foundation. This held true for every single Beatles number Richie played ... Ringo also was a great tom tom player." ( Summer of Love, 1994)

but also

George Martin -- "Ringo has a tremendous feel for a song and he always helped us hit the right tempo the first time. He was rock solid. This made the recording of all the Beatle songs so much easier." (interviewed in 1988 for The Beatles Recording Sessions by Mark Lewisohn)

Well, I could cop out and say I meant "San Francisco", when I really was just thinking of Parker Godwin, whose mediocre 1982 SF novel I read about the time I read "Godwin's Law" on Usenet, around 1992.

Mike Godwin pointed out that Usenet flame wars go on forever, and should be stopped when they inevitably devolve to calling each other "Hitler". But, given that my original post is about fascism, that aspect doesn't apply (unless you want this thread to stop, enough already...). The aspect that does apply, which invoking Godwin's Law is often expected to produce, is to stop discussions when comparisons are made to Hitler or Nazis. Which is inane, and what the post to which I replied was invoking. Despite the good work of Mike Godwin.

The Boy Who Waterskied to Forever (1982)

OK, in most of the English-speaking world, "Broadband" is just a synonym for "High Bandwidth". But since this is Slashdot, I'm allowed to pick a technical nit and point out that the "correct" definition refers to a kind of multiplexing.

Yeah, same here.

I had Internet America install my DSL service. They have a self-install option, with micro-filters and all, but it was not available to me because I was so far from the C.O. (15.6 kft) that I needed a dedicated pair to get any decent bandwidth (I chose the 768kb/s down, 384 kb/s up option) -- They said I could probably get that, via ADSL if I opted to go with a dedicated pair, and, if it didn't work, all charges would be refunded. Rather cool, actually.

Of course, the dedicated pair costs me some US$15 a month from the telco for a total of $81.18 a month, but the service has been great: static IP, no caps, I can run "small" servers and so on. And, while it's no doubt a bridged connection, I do see good download speeds. So I'm happy. None of this "ping is a hacker's tool, the use of which violates the AUP" crap.

Anyway, I receive a Broadxtent bridge in the mail, and a note to schedule an appointment. I mount the bridge in my headend, check the demarc, and lo and behold!, I have two brand new pairs already pulled for the DSL service. So, I schedule the install for the next day. Meanwhile, I figure, "Heck, all I have to do is hook up that pair, cross-connect it to the bridge connection on the right 110 block, and configure my router, and I should be all set." Sure enuf, that's all it took.

So, I call Internet America first thing the next day, and tell them to not bother sending the installer, it's alive, kicking, and showing decent up/down speeds. "But sir, we want to make sure it's installed correctly to avoid a service call." O.K., I can understand this. "Anyway, you paid the $150 installation fee (the telco pair drop portion was unavoidable anyway) -- might as well have the tech stop by." Well, O.K. then.

Tech shows up, looks at my computer, working fine, with an RJ45 cable snaking off (I hadn't finished the drop to that room yet, so I just snaked a cable back to the headend), and asks, "Where's our modem?" "The headend," I reply, "I hadn't installed the drop to this room yet. Follow the ethernet cable."

So, he does, and sure enough, I hear a "Damn! I wouldn'tve done as good a job!" He smiled, we talked shop for about 10 minutes, and that was it.

To their credit, Internet America left my computer alone, gave me a static IP with no fuss, and have provided decent service since. The Broadxtent bridge locks up every few months, but a power-cycle fixes that.

FWIW, my linksys router/firewall can spoof MAC addresses for just this purpose. Of course, my ISP is decent enough that I don't have to.

I haven't had any trouble with them, primarily because I haven't signed up with them. However, like cable, it's a contention-based system that can't be alleviated by throwing more hardware at it, unless you have the channel capacity in advance, or can buy it. With DSL, you just get fatter pipes, and change your aggregation as you scale, so the contention need not get bad (this does not mean that ISPs will go to those lengths, of course, just that it's easier than with a wireless system).

I currently use Internet America for my DSL needs and am generally satisfied -- about once a month I have to power cycle the DSL modem they provide for some reason (but, then again, I run a dedicated connection on a firewalled and NATted static IP 24x7). Of course, because I'm 15.6 kft from the DSLAM, I have to use a pair dedicated for the DSL line, and pay for that "dry" pair: that makes up $15 of my approx. $80/month fee. It's steep, but it beats SBC's PPPoE offering. And, so far, Internet America has been nice about my running servers (they really only care about bandwidth hogs, and the only "servers" I run is sendmail to sink email for my domain, and sshd for remote access). I've seen some brain dead TOS from other access providers where simply pinging remote hosts is forbidden as "hacking".

...on a dedicated pair 12.6 kft from the C/O, from Internet America in the Dallas, Texas area.

Also, it can spoof any MAC address I chose on it's WAN port. (Yes, the MAC address can get sent over the DSL Modem, if it does ethernet encapsulation over ATM, and the ISP might care what it is).

FWIW, my ISP doesn't have this kind of "no NAT, no servers, no pinging" bullshit in their AUP -- they just don't want me to generate a disproportionate amount of outbound traffic.

I pay around $80 a month for 768 kb/s downstream, 384 kb/s upstream to Internet America. $15 of that is for a dedicated pair they lease from SW Bell because, at 15.6 kft from the CO, ADSL is not guaranteed to work piggybacked on a POTS line.

But even at $65 a month, that's way too expensive for most people.

Now, it is true, that I can get SW Bell's offering for around $50/month, but it is PPPoE hell with lousy TOS (in my opinion) -- my neighbor suffers with this.

Airmail.net (Internet America) has no problem with me running an "smtp" server to sink my email (of course, they appreciate that I do not relay) or any other server as long as I do not have "excessive" upstream bandwidth. Other ISPs freak at the mere suggestion of doing something like that. On the PPPoE issue, "we looked at that and held our noses" was their unoffocial comment. SOLD!

In short, I am a satisfied customer.

I have been self-employed most of my career now, and I try to minimize the amount of time off that I have. Right now, I haven't got any full-time gigs, and I would much rather have been working than sitting around the house today.

Besides, not everyone is Christian.
--
See my custom-made Concealed-Carry Holster
--

...and not a bogus redial-on-carrier-drop that violated the TOS with my provider.

Disclaimer: This may read like an ad for Internet America. While it is somewhat of a testemonial, I am just a satisfied customer, and receive no financial compensation for saying nice things about them.

In days gone by, I'd dream of an ISDN connection, or even dedicated 56k. But the price/performance just wasn't there: around $100/month for the physical line and connectivity. DSL, of course started to look attractive. I'd never been a fan of cable modems, what with the shared media, dynamic IPs, and generally draconian TOS.

When I moved to a Dallas suburb, I priced various offerings, and ended up with Internet America. I stayed in a month-to-month apartment for about 6 weeks until I bought and closed on a house, and the following factors were important:

I needed dial up access for a short time, month-to-month while I was at the apartment.

I wanted to make sure that the TOS were reasonable. Some are downright insane: pinging remote hosts, even with consent, was considered "hacking" and could get your account suspended. Running any server, even an smtp sink (non-relaying, of course) was verbotten, and forget about a static IP. Often there were stingy traffic quotas.

Naturally, I wanted to make sure that service was likely available in the area where I'd be buying a home.

Internet America fit this bill nicely: dial-up and DSL, reasonable TOS ("Oh, things like SMTP are fine, even a Web server as long as you don't saturate the uplink -- we're geeks, we understand" from tech. support), and various access plans (fast, faster, and fastest, er, duh, I guess).

I was a bit out of range from the CO (15.6 kft) so they couldn't piggyback on the existing POTS service. But, for an extra $15 a month, they'd lease a dry pair and add the cost to my bill. Bottom line is that I've got 768 kbps down by 384 kbps up on a dedicated pair for $74.99 a month, plus tax ($81.18). Not exactly cheap, but they don't appear to be going out of business.

The big plus, though, is service. Static IP? No problem, I get one free. Their tech people admitted to having looked at PPPoE over ATM, and having held their noses, decided it wasn't the way to go. I had a few glitches with billing (like not dropping the dial up charges when I get DSL), and the odd 15 minute outage but these were resolved (actually we're still looking at the outage but as it happens so rarely it isn't a real problem and is hard to track down -- they suspect their DSL modem). They even back-credited me for 2 months of dialup charges while I had DSL -- many providers won't do that under any circumstances, being so eager to nickel and dime their customers.

Now, like most slashdotters, I'm not your typical "one computer plugged into the DSL modem" guy: I've got a headend with the DSL modem, a 10/100 Mb/s 8 port Linksys firewall/router doing NAT, with wired drops to rooms all over the house. I run [GNU/]Linux, sink my own email, plan to provide SSH access, and might run a non-advertised web server (on other than port 80). In short, I use the DSL line as a shared connection for the whole house's traffic, eventually with 3 or 4 computers behind the firewall. As long as I don't excessively saturate the uplink, Internet America is "O.K." with this.

Basically I get DNS delegation (for my domain) from register.com, DNS and secondary MX from iicinternet.com, and am very pleased.

Compare this with my neighbor across the street is in Southwestern Bell Hell: he pays $49.95 a month for draconian TOS with PPPoE. He gets dropped at the strangest times (not just when idle), and his DSL modem requires frequent power cycles because it loses sync. His service is down so much that he retains a dial-up modem and needs it weekly. I'm over there about once every 2-3 weeks resetting his DSL modem, or reconfiguring his networking options. He isn't using a firewall (oops), and I hope his box does not get r()()73d, as they say ('course it's just running Windoze).

Is the extra $25 a month that I pay worth it? Obviously I think so.

Again, this is just a review of my experience with a particular provider. I've heard grumblings about them from others, but am satisfied myself. Naturally, YMMV.

Perhaps Hydrogen wasn't as dumb an idea as it seems.

We drive about in cars filled with nasty exploding or burnable gasoline. You take a risk with any form of energy, or transport, and you try to pick the best you can. Go back to 1960 detroit and say "plastics are the future, or and so are carbon" and you'd get laughed out by the engineers. Or, how about the concept that the lowest voltage you can effectivly switch a transistor for computers was 5 volts. We today may think hydrogen is a dumb idea, but it MAY be the way we'll move about in the future.

points out how hydrogen is not what was the inital problem, but how it was the 'skin'.

Speaking of their CTO, I wonder if this is the same Doug Davis who used to be ddavis@seas.smu.edu, and ran either the Dallas UUCP feed or managed the .lonestar.org domain.

Yes, it is, and he's also the former CEO of Internet America. He left that position officially January 1 of this year to take the CTO position at DCCI.
;

I was going to say the same thing, but you beat me to it friend.

Folks, mod this guy up another for me!

More detail: Python is an object-oriented language built as such from the ground up, un like C++ which is none the less derived from C and has less syntactical conformity (and I say this where my only difference with the above statement is that I perfer C++ slightly over Python, though Python is a close second.) Not only that, but Python is a great numeric language with native Ultra-Long integer type and a complex number module build in. With the LLNL PyNum Numeric Extensions. Couldn't find a good implementation of the Gamma function over the set of Complex numbers, but I guess your youngins' ern't inta that yet. :)

Another possility if you wanna get retro is do what I and doubtless you did: teach them on the C64! That is, get one of the variety of C64 emulators on the net and let them programme their hearts out in Basic. The great thing about the C64 is that because it uses PET/ASCII with all those graphics character in the characters with the MSB high so it's pretty easy to use graphics without having to use MoveTo, LineTo and the DC (if you do go the Windows route -- though so far all I've suggested exists in Linux-port form and I don't recommend teaching X-Motif just yet! :) The point is, it's much more WYSIWYG and really easy to come up with some cool stuff. For instance, I wrote a character editor for the C64 which was quite a fun project. The advantage is that the entire operating system is Basic so you have to be a programmer from the beginning just to use it. :) Disadvantage: it's a Proceedural, not on OOP language.

A good list of available emulators can be found at http://commodore64.net/emulators/

The other thing I would strongly recomend is Logo. Logo is graphics and geometry application in which the user controls a 'turtle' by simple geometric commands. This is a great tool for learning the [most] basic principals of Graphics which I'm sure your kids will be most interested in because of their love for games. They can use it to draw their own pictures using basic proceedural programming techniques such as loops and recursion.

You can get an MS Windows version of Logo at: http://www.softronix.com/logo.html.

You could also download a Linux port of the Berkley Logo Software from this University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill software archive though you may need to check out Steve Bakers' Software Page if you have any problems with the port.

Anyway, Python DOES have a pretty good graphics library and with TCL/TK you could even teach them a bit about interface design and with PIL you've got Graphics so that's just about everything. Anyway, at least I would choose one or more of those three options and make sure in time they should try to learn them all.

One last note I should make is it's you be very helpful to their overall understanding of programming and logic if they could learn at least one rule-based language down the road, such as Scheme (thank you Professor Romanik! :).

Be Seeing You,

Jeffrey.

Did anyone else follow the teapot Link on the page? It was pretty interesting reading, and anyone who's done any 3d modeling will probably get a kick out of it... Unfortunately, almost all of the external links (from the teapot page) were dead :(

[ c h a d &nbsp o k e r e ]

The failure of technology today is that it has minimized the awe inspiring side effects. Now we need artificial side effects of glowing LEDs, neon tubes, and bogus megahertz readouts. We no longer know how to build technology that is visually impressive merely as the result of its essence. Like the fake decorative window shutters without hinges on bogus ``colonial'' American homes, our technological monuments are phony, and unable to be even minimally monumental. Thank God that Y2k will soon change the course of history, and bring about a reformation to what technology was and can be again.