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Anybody have more than four local UHF stations?

Last time I checked, Las Vegas had more than a dozen. Only three or four of them are carried by the local cable system; you get to break out the rabbit ears if you want to tune in the rest. (When UPN moved to a different station a few years ago, Cox didn't bother carrying the new channel for a year or two after the move. If you wanted to watch Voyager, you had an antenna.)

I don't know what kind of traffic you are talking about here, but I'm serving some 10-15Gb a month from my Earthlink DSL on a PII-300 running FreeBSD.

Sounds like my site, only mine gets less traffic (or else my outbound connection would be pegged) and I'm running Linux.

Can I take a slashdot effect with this setup? No. Will I ever be slashdotted? Not likely :)

Been there, done that, wasn't able to do much with my connection for a day or so when it happened. :-) The server didn't mind at all (dual P!!!-500 with 256MB of RAM and 8GB of SCSI RAID-0 disk), but the cable modem stayed lit up like a Christmas tree.

I was reading just recently about another company researching the same idea, but with solar powered lenticular semi-rigid blimp platforms in geostationary orbit.

http://www.lvcm.com/walden/products.html#strat

The pictures look great, they also have cargo and ecoturism lenticular blimp projects.

Broadband is doing just fine where I live (Central NJ). Most of my neighbors have cable modems on Optimum Online with it's great 1 Mb/sec up 5 Mb/sec down service at $29.95/mo.

Don't get DSL, though...Sprint couldn't keep a DSLAM running if its life depended on it. We have both cable-modem and DSL service at work (don't ask why), and while DSL has improved somewhat recently, there was a period of about a month when you could count on the DSL cutting in and out several times in the morning. Fortunately, it's not too big a deal to switch the DSL users over to the cable modem if necessary (move a network cable, switch floppies in the router, reboot the router, and wait a couple of minutes for it to start up again...Coyote Linux is schweet).

readying content eh? Doesn't that remind anyone of excite's now-doomed business model?

The @Home business, although not stellar, has been able to round up significantly more subscribers than DSL. If or when the company goes under, it's because the content/portal side hemorrhaged money.

(They do a pretty good job of keeping it running, too...a hell of a lot better than Sprint does at keeping DSL going. We have both cable-modem and DSL service at work (don't ask why). For the past two weeks or so, the DSLAM that services our part of town has been on-and-off. Before that, there have been other reliability issues. The worst that's happened with the cable modem, OTOH, are all the morons running unpatched IIS who've let their systems get infected with the Code Red worm.)

I tried this approach. I registered a domain name. I figured out how host that domain name on my dynamic IP address (assigned via PPPoE). I downloaded, installed and learnt about Debian.

Within a month my ISP had started deploying a port 25 filter :(. They claim it's to combat SPAM originating from their network. It seems that this is a popular tactic of many large ISPs. What BS. Like many other people, I'm looking for an alternative ISP.

Assuming that you're on some sort of broadband connection, see if you can get a static IP address. You might need to switch from residential to commercial service, but you can generally do what you want with a static IP.

I set up a mail server on a dynamic IP through Cox about a year and a half ago. It worked fine on that until they rolled out DOCSIS service for residential users. At that time, they blocked inbound port 25 to dynamic IPs; I learned of it when I stopped receiving email one day. :-P Previously, both residential and commercial users were issued COM21 modems...now COM21 modems are only issued to commercial users, though residential users who already had them were grandfathered in. In any case, there's no difference in cost at the lowest service levels between residential and commercial accounts, but static IPs ($10 each) are only available for commercial accounts. If the difference in cost isn't outrageous in your area, it's an option to consider.

@home users can always use an alternate news server. The @home groups have a habit of not having good retention time anyway. Supernews is pretty good, from what I hear.

Cox outsources to Supernews for its Usenet service. Yes, it's pretty decent...retention in alt.binaries.sounds.mp3, for instance, currently has 64175 articles going back 2.3 days (I've seen it higher before, but alt.binaries.sounds.mp3 is one of the highest-volume newsgroups, if not the highest). Before I signed up for cable-modem service, I used Supernews with a cheap dial-up ISP to bypass their crappy news server.

I've taken a brief look at these and they appear to be wonderful very useful tools, aside from the patent stuff in question. I appears that IPIX is acting in an overbroad manner by supressing these.

Chris Cothrun
Curator of Chaos

I use Claranews. It's a good server with an annual fee.

You get what you pay for.

Supernews is pretty decent, too. It's a bit more expensive now than when I last subscribed to it (used to be $10/month), but my cable-modem service provider outsources Usenet to Supernews so it's part of what I pay for that.

...after a few more years, the novelty of the 'net will fade, and it will become a standard part of our lives. People won't see the need to have their own website anymore, unless they really are trying to share something with the world that is worthwhile.

No offense, but bullshit. Did the novelty of the Polaroid fade? Are the only people who have an interest in photography these days folks like Ansel and Maplethorpe? No! Now we have disposable cameras and sticky film.

Personal pages will be around as long as somebody's giving away free hosting in exchange for ad banners... Now if you want to debate the certain death of the ad banner, that's different. :-)

Screw the banners...with broadband to the home, you can run your own server and put whatever you want on it, with the only size limit being what your hard drive can hold and without those stupid "punch the monkey" banner ads. If anything, personal pages have the potential to proliferate (say that three times quickly :-) ) to an even greater extent than before, and potentially with less meddling from The Powers That Be (assuming for a moment that they don't do something really stupid, like say that you can't host your own website on your cable-modem or DSL connection).

(FWIW, I've heard from people in other parts of the country with high-bandwidth connections that their usage of those connections is somewhat restricted. Maybe I'm lucky, as the provider I'm using doesn't seem to care much what I do with the fat pipe, as long as I don't resell bandwidth or provide warez/kiddie pr0n/etc. through whatever services I might make available. Besides, with 128 kbps upstream, it's only good for a personal site that sees maybe 10-20 hits on a good day.)

I agree, the 24 hour everything is great sometimes. As with any town, there is the good and the bad.

The lack of support for the tech industry from the government and the big industry guns in town, the casinos, makes Las Vegas a poor place for tech. I beleive there is only one software firm in town, Westwood Studios, the rest are all VARS, and consultants. They cater mostly to the Hotels/Casinos, construction, or government. This is also a very big Microsoft town. There is the LVLUG that is shaping up nicely, but Microsoft seems to have hits hands around the neck of the management types in this town (I really can't say it is any different elsewhere, but this is a Unix User's perspective of this town)

On the good side, the Local Cable Service Rocks. 512/128 DN/UP plus Static IP for $39.99 month ($29 for std service plus $10 for Static IP) No firewalls, no blocked ports (except 25, which you can ask to be removed) No PPPOE to mess with either (for Local ADSL, what a mess.) Mostly excellent support, too.

Housing prices are good, but all the growth has caused traffic, water and civil service problems. There are no state taxes, but higher gas taxes, and sales taxes. There are also strong smog rules in the valley, a smog check is required every year in LV.