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Ya, it's kind of a non-story really. Ok, he used a replica panel, and you can't just buy those online easily. But a raspberry pi running an emulator is just decidedly not geeky. I can run Unix version 1 and 6 and BSD 2.9 on my Mac and PC, but I don't tell people I rebuilt a PDP-7 or PDP-11 or VAX.

Meanwhile there ARE people out there who have built real computers and CPUs from scratch as a hobby, without any emulators behind the scenes. Check out the http://members.iinet.net.au/~d... web ring. Those are infinitely cooler I think.

It's a ClimateChangeDoom sort of thing. The real story is environmental control and contingency planning at the Perth Data Center. If it were my data center we'd rent coolers before we shut anything down. It was 44.2C on 26-Dec-2007, not as if it could never happen again.

Hmmm... maybe not ALL but several. They ran at 3 mips and there is an emulator.

The system has worked perfectly from the programming and electrical point of view. There have been a few failures in the mechanical engineering, mainly with the rubber bands I use for the pulleys, and the pulleys coming loose.

Well to give a couple of examples of plans in Australia (looking at DSL plans, rather than fibre or cable):

Example of a cheaper ISP: http://www.tpg.com.au/products_services/adsl2-standalone

Examples of a higher-end ISP (generally better network/less contention/better customer service):

http://www.internode.on.net/residential/adsl_broadband/easy_broadband/
http://www.iinet.net.au/internet/broadband/naked-dsl/

It's worth noting that due to competition laws, most Australians living in cities and towns have a LOT of ISP options. Not just the 2-3 options available in many areas in the US but typically 20+ choices of ADSL provider. The owner of the telephone lines is required to wholesale access to any third party that wants it.

I am a fan of the people who build their own computers from MSI components.

I discovered microprocessors around 1980, when I was 14 years old, but here in little Belgium I was never able to do something with that knowledge at that time, but my interest got me a bachelors degree in electronics, and a good (better) understanding on how software works. I was always interested in FPGA, but it is only since 2010-2012 that I got finally a possibility to do more than programming. I got my master degree in electronics, and on the way I learned VHDL (one of the reasons that I wanted to go for my master degree), and got an interesting school assignment about on the fly reconfigurable hardware and a thesis involving the Spartan-6 Atlys board.

Also, since 2004 I have been working on and off studying Common Lisp, and processor emulators.

Well, since September 2012 I have been designing a simple microprocessor, for which I first did the implementation of an assembler in Common Lisp, and a simulator, and start of this September I finally got around implementing the simple computer system in VHDL. I was surprised how easy it was, given that I only have about 1 to 2 hours a day in the evening to work on things. It is currently a 16-bit thing which uses 64kB of FPGA block RAM.

Thus, with software knowledge and VHDL, it should become even easier to build custom microprocessors.

And I am not even crossing this line. It has always interested me to go for both hard- and software, but due to circumstances I ended up more on the side of software.

Having the room for doing electronics properly is not that easy. One needs a place committed to it, which can not be used by other people in the family. For that reason, I like the concept of FPGA development boards. It lets me do what I want to, without needing to invest in dedicated space.

The Atlys board gives me all I need for growing in the future. The first part should be to make the system run using the on-board serial controller, so that I can control it through a terminal program, having access to a keyboard and a character terminal.

And I am not done with software, because one of my goals is to write a Lisp system for running on the system, and then start to optimize the ISA for better performance. Other things: go to a 32-bit implementation and start using the on-board 128 MB RAM memory.

Control Data 6000 series monsters from 1964 and its successors the Cybers, complete with screen shots of its then innovative console.

I had to take a semester of assembly language at college. The choice was a PDP-11 in the CS lab (sign up, lowest priority for time => late nights and weekends) or one section that would learn CDC6600 (Cyber 74) assembly. Guess which one I picked? :-) I have totally forgotten all I learned, but it sure was fun while I was doing it!

// eyes, lunar lander and baseball game on the dual vector displays

Control Data 6000 series monsters from 1964 and its successors the Cybers, complete with screen shots of its then innovative console.

I had to take a semester of assembly language at college. The choice was a PDP-11 in the CS lab (sign up, lowest priority for time => late nights and weekends) or one section that would learn CDC6600 (Cyber 74) assembly. Guess which one I picked? :-) I have totally forgotten all I learned, but it sure was fun while I was doing it!

// eyes, lunar lander and baseball game on the dual vector displays

A favorite is an emulation of another of Seymour Cray's earlier designs, the Control Data 6000 series monsters from 1964 and its successors the Cybers, complete with screen shots of its then innovative console. I'd love to have this running on my iMac. I still have a copy of the old MIT Adventure game in FORTRAN for these beasts from my college days I wish I could play again. I'm too lazy to try to port it over to something else or get it to compile in a more modern FORTRAN compiler. However, the emulator does not include a copy of the NOS 2 dead start tape.

A favorite is an emulation of another of Seymour Cray's earlier designs, the Control Data 6000 series monsters from 1964 and its successors the Cybers, complete with screen shots of its then innovative console. I'd love to have this running on my iMac. I still have a copy of the old MIT Adventure game in FORTRAN for these beasts from my college days I wish I could play again. I'm too lazy to try to port it over to something else or get it to compile in a more modern FORTRAN compiler. However, the emulator does not include a copy of the NOS 2 dead start tape.

1. The NBN fiber is 100Mbps not 1Gbps (although they could upgrade the switches in the future to make it faster.
2. iiNets offers cheaper plans on NBN than naked dsl, which is the equivlant, for equivlant speeds (ADSL2+ will rarley reach 24Mbps, mine is 10.5Mbps up, 1 down)
3. 100Mbps/40Mbps (fastest avaliable speed) with 100GB on-peack and 100GB off peak data is $79.95/month not $250/month.
And I found that without even looking around, I'm sure that iiNet won't be the cheapest and that prices will go down when more people start using it. Source

Um, iiNet is currently offering plans of up to 100Mbps because it was always being rolled out at 100Mbps. Although at one point they where considering 1Gbps.

So far the NBN has been pretty hideous cost wise as the increased speed for many is simply not worth the significant increase in cost

You mean like how internode's 25/5 NBN entry level plan (30Gb quota) is $5 cheaper than their equivalent Naked ADSL plan and their 300Gb quota plan is $15 cheaper than Naked ADSL.

And iiNet's 100Gb (Peak) + 100Gb (Off Peak) 25/5 plan is $5 cheaper than their 100Gb (any time) Naked ADSL plan, for more quota, and 500Gb+500Gb 25/5 NBN is cheaper than 400Gb Naked ADSL.

iPrimus's NBN plans aren't particularly competitive - their 25/2 plans are $10 more expensive than their equivalent naked ADSL plans (unless you "bundle" with an expensive VOIP phone service) and around $5 more expensive than the Internode & iiNet NBN plans, but their 12/1 plans are the same price as their Naked ADSL, so you can switch to NBN with no change in cost (but potentially slower speeds, depending on the length&quality of your current copper)

So what's this "hideous" cost you speak of?

great now 2 things...

let them know by switching to an ISP who won't filtering the internet is wrong

http://www.iinet.net.au/

secondly let your MP know filtering is not a good plan... a list of websites and twitter can be found :

http://www.abc.net.au/tv/qanda/find-your-local-mp.htm

regards

John Jones

Yes; http://www.turbohercules.com/. Near and dear to my heart is the CDC Cyber series on which I had to run my COBOL assignments at uni; http://members.iinet.net.au/~tom-hunter/. Anyone also do assignments on PDP 11/70's as I did also? http://www.dbit.com/. Christ, I bet there's an emulator for any platform and architecture that's existed.

Well we have 'bad' ISPs here as well but there are quite a few good ones that are genuine innovators and care a lot about the quality of their network and customer service etc. Since we have such a huge selection of ISPs to choose from (for example, here are the ISPs/plans I can choose in my State). They have to differentiate themselves somehow, much more so than in the US, if they want to attract customers and survive. Some compete on price, others on network quality, customer service, bundled extras etc.

The ISP I'm on (Internode) is not the cheapest, but their network is second to none and they are more customer-focused than most. They are considered in a way a geeks' ISP in that they trial newer technologies earlier than most (first fully native IPv6 residential connections in Australia being one recent example). Previously I was with iiNet who are also top notch IMO.

That tech is about 200 years old. No kidding. 1st documented rescue rocket rescue 18 February 1808.

http://members.iinet.net.au/~dodd/gail/publications/trengrouse/Essay.html

I have no problem with companies giving precedence to real-time communications, from voice, to video, to gaming, in order to facilitate an improved experience for the users.

As a matter which might be of interest to some, my Australian ISP has for a long time offered a scale of connections (within the same ADSL2+ price plan) that is supposed to optimise connections for gamers to give "quickest connection response rather than a faster download speed". However, I haven't run any kind of benchmarks to check up on the validity of this claim, which might be best ingested with NaCl.

I actually like the parent's Doritos analogy - it's true when you think of it that way

If the weight of a packet of crisps diminished the further away you got from the shop, it would not only be perfectly legal, but prudent to advertise as "up to 200 grams". So the Analogy is terrible

With DSL your speed is entirely dependent on environmental conditions. With Cable it's entirely dependent on load. With Fibre, then you have a point as it should sync at whatever speed your paying for but with 2 Mbit Fibre coming in at A$500 a month, forget that. This is how Australian ISP's market their broadband offerings (ADSL2+). Some are quite unscrupulous but still legal whilst some actually publish information on expected speeds and at what rate they drop. So there is nothing wrong or misleading about the "Up To" advertising because they cannot physically guarantee a certain speed at any one time (thus expecting them to is unreasonable).

I recommend NOT buying a Hantek USB oscilloscope.

I got a DSO-2250 which sounded good for the money. I would have spent more time reading reviews, this review sums it up.

The software for windows is buggy and limited. They seem to have largely rewritten the software between version 6 and version 7 but have just replaced old bugs with different bugs.
The most frustrating bug is that it gets stuck and stops triggering until you close and reopen the software. It's really annoying to have your hands full poking the probes into some equipment and not knowing if you have missed the packet of data you are trying to catch because it wasn't sent or because the scope software didn't work.

The manufacturer claims 8bit sampling and 250 megasamples/second.
Sadly the hardware is noisy and the lowest two bits randomly change. The software has a smoothing option to hide the noise but then you don't get anything like the time resolution you paid for.
If the software was better I could live with that as I mostly look at digital signals.

I still personally favour a PC oscilloscope since I haul a laptop around and might as well make use of it's high resolution screen.
For digital work a 'scope that can capture a one time event to look at at your leisure is far better than an analog scope that needs a repetitive signal to keep refreshing the CRT.

http://members.iinet.net.au/~vannevar/tyrian/

Here's the official page with EVERY Tyrian version.

"How about Tyrian"

http://members.iinet.net.au/~vannevar/tyrian/

Tyrian was released as freeware AGES AGO.

No need to be curious. iiNet is a public company, with publicly accessible annual reports like this "Income Statement, Balance Sheet, Statements of Changes in Equity and Cash flow Statement".

In this you'll find iiNet had revenue of approx AUD 250M in FY 2008 (July 2007 to June 2008), gross profit of about AUD62M and net profit of ~AUD20M.

Not a financial powerhouse, but I am given to understand Telstra ($4B annual profit) and Optus (can't locate numbers) have been lending a hand. If so, that does give rise to the potential of a prolonged fight, especially as Telstra has more subscribers than anyone else.

Believe me, speaking as an Australian this isn't our line of thought. From iinet's news:

For the record, iiNet doesn't support any breaches of the law, including copyright theft. On the contrary, iiNet has led the industry with legal content offerings through our Freezone, including agreements with iTunes, ABC iView, Xbox, the West Australian Symphony Orchestra, Cruizin', Macquarie Digital TV, Barclays Premier League Football, Super 14 Rugby, Drift Racing 2007 and classic highlights of golf's four Majors.

We don't believe we should take any action which could result in the disconnection of a customer's service, based on poorly supported allegations. AFACT are asking us to be the investigator, judge and executioner despite their failure to provide us with tangible evidence.

The approach that AFACT has taken is akin to arguing that if a person were to use Australia Post to deliver a pirated DVD, Australia Post has authorised the pirated content on the DVD by delivering it.

And it seems, iinet's line of thinking, is more along the lines of what sensible aussies are thinking.

Problem being that the wankers in government and even more so the insane bureaucrats and public servants seem to follow the AFACT line of thinking (Big Brother style policy in the name of "protecting" us poor citizens from ourselves) and too many of us are apathetic with the "she'll be 'right" or "what can I do about it" attitudes... and I for one am sick of it. STAND UP PEOPLE!!

For the record, iiNet doesn't support any breaches of the law, including copyright theft. On the contrary, iiNet has led the industry with legal content offerings through our Freezone, including agreements with iTunes, ABC iView, Xbox, the West Australian Symphony Orchestra, Cruizin', Macquarie Digital TV, Barclays Premier League Football, Super 14 Rugby, Drift Racing 2007 and classic highlights of golf's four Majors.

We don't believe we should take any action which could result in the disconnection of a customer's service, based on poorly supported allegations. AFACT are asking us to be the investigator, judge and executioner despite their failure to provide us with tangible evidence.

The approach that AFACT has taken is akin to arguing that if a person were to use Australia Post to deliver a pirated DVD, Australia Post has authorised the pirated content on the DVD by delivering it.

And it seems, iinet's line of thinking, is more along the lines of what sensible aussies are thinking.

My freshman year at CSU the CS department retired their Cyber Mainframe running NOS. We joked that it stood for "No OS".

You can find an emulator for the Cyber - even so it doesn't come with the OS (in this case it is truely "No OS"):

http://members.iinet.net.au/~tom-hunter/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CDC_Cyber

-CF

What I got from reading my Verizon DSL service agreement was that they were making no warranty at all concerning the actual throughput on my line, regardless of the advertised speed. And they wonder why I don't want to subscribe to FIOS, which seems to have the same disclaimer. It would be interesting to know if other countries' ISPs commit to provide the advertised throughput.

The inconstant speeds experienced with DSL are due to environmental conditions. The further away you are from the DSLAM at the telephone exchange the slower the signal, line quality also plays a part in signal speed.

To answer you other question, here in Australia ISP's are not permitted to advertise what they cannot provide. Most ISP's advertise their speed as "up to x Mbs". This is OK as they are not promising x Mbs but are saying that x Mbs is the maximum possible speed for that service. Take iinet for example, who advertise "ADSL 2+ speeds" which is 24 Mbs maximum. iinet then goes on to explain what can be expected from "ADSL 2+ speeds". iinet is one of Australia's better ISP's.

In Australia broadband is defined as speeds exceeding 56k, Telstra who is Australia's largest telco defines their "super fast broadband" as exceeding 200 Kbs. It's quite illegal to advertise a service that you cannot provide over here.

What I got from reading my Verizon DSL service agreement was that they were making no warranty at all concerning the actual throughput on my line, regardless of the advertised speed. And they wonder why I don't want to subscribe to FIOS, which seems to have the same disclaimer. It would be interesting to know if other countries' ISPs commit to provide the advertised throughput.

The inconstant speeds experienced with DSL are due to environmental conditions. The further away you are from the DSLAM at the telephone exchange the slower the signal, line quality also plays a part in signal speed.

To answer you other question, here in Australia ISP's are not permitted to advertise what they cannot provide. Most ISP's advertise their speed as "up to x Mbs". This is OK as they are not promising x Mbs but are saying that x Mbs is the maximum possible speed for that service. Take iinet for example, who advertise "ADSL 2+ speeds" which is 24 Mbs maximum. iinet then goes on to explain what can be expected from "ADSL 2+ speeds". iinet is one of Australia's better ISP's.

In Australia broadband is defined as speeds exceeding 56k, Telstra who is Australia's largest telco defines their "super fast broadband" as exceeding 200 Kbs. It's quite illegal to advertise a service that you cannot provide over here.

I have to overall agree with your post.
I prefer 7 to Vista, there's several "UI neatening" things going on making it overall easier on the eye (for classic users, we're a dying breed)

I won't rant for hours passionately as I normally do, I end up a with a +5 and sense of accomplishment that others feel the same but this isn't the place for it, Microsoft need to hear my rants, not poor /. readers.

I will say one thing though, while win7 is overall actually,.. seemingly usable thus far, for christs @#%ing sakes can they stop doing UI design 'randomly' by changing shit then running it by the oblivious testers?
The god damned status bar in Windows explorer no longer displays drive free space.
WHO would remove that? Why? This to me shows a clear disconnection with the development team and the real world.
Sure it's only small but it's like blocking 20% of the windscreen out on a new car for no reason.... WHY?
http://members.iinet.net.au/~scottylans/Statusbarfail.jpg

While I'm in only half rant, for christs sakes, let me optionally turn off the breadcrumbs, it's like aids for Windows Explorer.
Otherwise - some good moves, especially on the 'named' 'date modified' 'size' etc bars on the right, no longer have that dopey, messy downarrow on them.

- Scott

Reminds me of this homebuilt remote mower: http://members.iinet.net.au/~tnpshow/RCLM/intro.htm The best ever would be if you mounted a wireless videocamera on top so you could get a first-person view from the mower.

I'm playing devil's advocate here, but thanks for the suggestions. Hopefully it'll be helpful for someone.

I believe that the CAT5 device you speak of is better described as a LART. More information and example usage here.

Just watch if you had a real time clock too - early-amiga-era clock batteries have a VERY nasty habit of leaking onto the motherboard after a few years in storage, eating through circuit traces (not limited to amigas either, watch out on any computers from that era with battery-backed clocks)

But the 3 largest in Australia -- Optus and iiNet as well as Telstra are not taking part in these trials.

iiNet is taking part.

Why aren't iiNet participating in the trial?

They have been the most vocal in agreeing to the trail since it was announced, specifically so they can use the results to show how stupid this is!

Have they been banned from the trial because of this attitude?

I'm with iiNet, but there's no way I'm dumping them, and here's one reason why: http://www.iinet.net.au/customers/iinews/internet-filtering.html

To summarise it, iiNet's only going along with the trial to demonstrate the futility of filtering. They're also currently fighting a court case regarding copyright infringement to maintain their user's privacy, instead of just rolling over like most other ISPs would.

The main problem though is that they control all the actual physical lines and others have to lease bandwidth so I can see them quite happily using this shit as a stick to beat their competitors.

We have this problem in Australia. Telstra, what came out of the government owned Australia Telecom when it was privatised in the 90's owns all the copper in Australia (95% of which was laid by the government using public money) but the main problem is fixed by the fact that the Telecoms regulator fixes the price at which Telstra can resell their copper lines and DSL services. This price is set at a level where Telstra can make a profit above the cost of line maintenance but Telstra constantly complains to the regulators as their other business units are losing money (having to support 3 different cellular transmitter networks when other networks only support two). Currently Telstra are stonewalling the National Broadband Network project which is intended to provide FTTN (Fibre To The Node) to Australian households, Telstra opposes this because the government refuses to grant them the same monopoly over fibre lines as they have over copper lines.

I don't know what the Irish regulators are like but I always assumed the EU and member states had some good consumer protection laws.

Thank God I live in Australia, where my ISP is committed to protecting its users: http://iinet.net.au/press/releases/201108_iinet_to_defend_court_action.pdf. They even publish some articles via torrents: http://iinet.net.au/press/media-releases.html
To anyone else who lives here, I highly recommend iiNet - they have *very* large (but relatively cheap) caps and own most of the ADSL2+ infrastructure.

Thank God I live in Australia, where my ISP is committed to protecting its users: http://iinet.net.au/press/releases/201108_iinet_to_defend_court_action.pdf. They even publish some articles via torrents: http://iinet.net.au/press/media-releases.html
To anyone else who lives here, I highly recommend iiNet - they have *very* large (but relatively cheap) caps and own most of the ADSL2+ infrastructure.

If you live in Australia, try iiNet. They have ADSL2+ where the others don't, and give you some of the largest caps (they also increase the size of your cap if you pay an extra $10 for VOIP).

http://members.iinet.net.au/~bofh/

But from a legal perspective, isn't downloading the act of copying data? The only users of the service would be intent on downloading illegal (or controversial, since they want to expand the scope of the filter) material, so the service could be seen as encouraging illegal acts.
iiNet is getting sued for the same thing, and that's only because they are the only ISP which provides high speed connections with large caps relatively cheap, meaning that they are the ISP of choice for BT users.
http://www.iinet.net.au/about/media/releases/201108_iinet_to_defend_court_action.pdf

A lot more than that (their website says over 700,000), but you'd probably only want to send notices when you are confident that were legal action brought you would be able to demonstrate that that particular user was committing piracy.

I found the title of this article misleading. Perhaps it should have read:

iiNet - Largest ISP in Australia to agree to "Ridiculous" Net-Filter Trial.

iiNet is currently Australia's third largest ISP - http://www.iinet.net.au/about/media/releases/20080508_iinet_comes_together_with_westnet.pdf

With sudo access, you can impersonate:
sudo su - someuser
is invaluable to check what might be wrong with the user account "someuser" (eg, wrong ssh keys in .ssh/known_hosts). And you don't need the users password ;)

Of course, BOFH is an invaluable source for inspiration. Gems like:

"Um, I need to know how to rename a file" he says.
Oh dear... Hang on, it's payday isn't it?! I'm in a good mood.
"Sure. You just go 'rm' and the filename"

really stayed with me all these years ;)

To add to OP, with Bigpond's "download limits", if you exceed your cap, you get charged 0.15c per extra megabyte downloaded, which works out to be $150 per a gigabyte see here, in comparison to Westnet for example, another Australian ISP which charges $6/GB (see: here.

I'm not sure how it works in other countries, but for most ISP's other than Bigpond, a scheme called "shaping" is in place for nearly all plans, so that when you exceed your download limit, your internet speed gets slowed to 64kbps for the remainder of the month (as opposed to paying for any excess you use). Bigpond have slowly been introducing their plans that "feature" unlimited downloads (shaping) - which have been a defacto standard for most other ISP's for long before. Bigpond sales have also been known to flat out refer to these "Liberty" plans as "unlimited downloads", without explaining the concept of shaping (believe me - I have had to explain this to several people).

As a subsidiary of the previously state-owned monopoly, Bigpond is a joke. I went from 256kbps @ 12GB for $60AU per month (believe me - not my choice) with Bigpond, to ADSL2+ speeds (realistically for me: 1MB/s~) @ 21GB (now 30GB) for $60AU a month with my current ISP (iiNet). On top of that, Bigpond tends to be rated far lower in customer service (see: here) than most other ISPs.

They should find an ISP that supports v.92 and made sure they're running a good ad filter (and probably something like Flashblock). Dial-up is survivable if you can kill the rich media ads.

Some ISPs also offer a "web accelerator" service that'll repack images and compress HTML for you.

Nothing new here; this has been an issue for decades. For some amusing anecdotes about passive-aggressive/aggressive IT guys, see the BOFH articles.

You clearly need to read the canonical guide to sysadmin ethics.

Listening to the web radio cuts into it.

No, from iiNet Free Zone many radio stations are available at different ports on iiradio.iinet.net.au.