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I don't remember the author.. it would have been in an "Asimov" or "Analog" and I think I read it in an anthology too. The decayed plant matter in the habitat is making it a little funky, so after what begins as a polite correspondence with the support rep.. the lone colonist is told to add mushroom spores and as the situation deteriorates further, beetles (to eat the mushrooms), birds, a cat, a predatory hawk, a miniature deer and so on.. the tone of the letters gets increasingly manic as the habitat fauna becomes increasingly dynamic. I tried googling too.. couldn't find it, but have you tried "Bears Discover Fire?" and the short "They're made out of meat".

For me, it was more cheap than lazy or sloppy. But I second most of the advice and offer the following:

Great soldering station with adjustable temperature: SS-1 for $40. Get this one or something like it. It's worth every penny.

Now, story time with a good moral. I was, two years ago, working on something with a super-cheap soldering iron that came with a computer toolkit with various screwdrivers and such, all of which are great other than the soldering iron. My grip on it slipped and my instinct from years of having pens and pencils slip in my hand was to pinch harder. Unfortunately, the lack of a safety guard on the iron meant that I pinched down very hard with my thumb and first two fingers on the hot barrel of the iron. The blisters went away after a few weeks but the pain lasted longer.

Yes, it's been done - albeit for the Commodore Plus/4, aka the Commodore 264.
http://plus4world.powweb.com/software/Fire_Ant
There's a WAV file there, recorded from a tape and yes, it works with certain emulators.

Unschooling is much more closely related to free schooling or democratic schooling as has been practiced successfully since the 1920s at places like Summerhill School. These students are sought after by colleges because they are articulate, self-motivated learners. It is actually much like college because students choose what to learn about (often through classes or workshops), rather than the high school model of everyone taking the same state-required classes. I would bet nearly all Slashdotters learned to code this way.

The biggest drawback to unschooling is that it pretty much requires one parent to stay home (or both to work part time). On the other hand, in areas where the public schools are underfunded, private schools can eat up all the income from a second job anyway.

...they left out the origin of the "Jack" character in Jack Attack.

(I appear to be showing my age here... Hold on, there's some pesky kids out front...)

I get 300GB storage and 3TB of bandwidth for under eight bucks a month (and they often have sign-up specials that knock that down to six or so). If all you're looking for is a gigantic inbox, I think that should suffice reasonably. PowWeb, if you care.

Most importantly, I have IMAP. I'd been bouncing between gmail and my own domain's mail for some time, but having finally set up IMAP through my host and not having that option with gmail, my solution is just to forward * to my IMAP'd domain.

Powweb has new owners, and now email sometimes is not forwarded. Posting anonymously to prevent retribution.

Can anyone recommend a reliable web hosting provider?

You can try http://www.powweb.com/ They usually keep on top of upgrades and have had php5.0 running for a while now.

http://picturesofwa.temp.powweb.com/gallerypics/20 1005/04_joy.jpg

I use PowWeb for the Mystery Studio site (see sig), $7.77 a month, 3000 GB/month, no big problems in the 2.5 years I'm hosted with them. http://www.powweb.com./ No, I don't work for them, and I won't get a comission.

Wow, nice job ripping your customers off! This is yet another reason why I have never trusted a "web dev" to tell me where to host my sites. $29.95 setup fee and $15.00/month for 25MB of space and 5GB transfer/month?! That's not even competitive with my old crappy dialup ISP's plan! And the last time I used them was.... 1998.

Let me give you an example of some other hosting companies' offerings. For $9.95/month dreamhost offers 2400MB of space, 120GB transfer/month, unlimited mysql, and a boatload of features your isoc site doesn't.

Powweb only offers one package. I've used them for the last 5 years, and the price hasn't changed, simply the package. Currently it is 5,000MB of space, 10GB/DAY of transfer (about 300GB/month), 650 mail boxes (unlimited aliases), and a ton of features that blow a lot of providers out of the water. All I really want is shell access, but it's no big deal because this is for a corporate site, not for me to have my own slash code sitting online somewhere.

Why refer your customers to a web hosting company if you don't even know of any review sites? That seems pretty ridiculous to me. Why don't you just tell them that you don't have any clue about it.

See the sig above: $16, $0 Domain, 7.6GB Disk, 192GB pipe, MySQL, RoR, IMAP, [alderflats.com] ("alderflats.com" links to Dreamhost.com.)

(I know this is off-topic, but it is on-topic in that sigs are allowed, and sometimes we need to comment on sigs.)

Now I understand the Dreamhost ads we see in people's sigs, including that in the parent comment:

"Earn $97 CASH for each account you refer! Introducing DreamHost Rewards - the most flexible affiliate program of the web hosting world! You can choose to receive substantial one-time credits for each of your referrals, or recurring credits for every payment that your referrals EVER make to DreamHost! Credits can be paid out via PayPal or check, or applied to a hosting bill with DreamHost.com. You don't even need to host with us yourself! "

We've had problems with Dreamhost in the past. That was 3 years ago. Maybe they've changed. Anyone have any experience with the present Dreamhost?

How does Dreamhost compare with Powweb, for example? They both seem to have abusive marketing ideas; that raises a red flag for me; if someone abuses other people, they will certainly abuse me, I think.

All those advertisements of huge bandwidth allotments are just sneaky marketing, for Powweb, anyway. Powweb limits the number of hits customers can get each day, so that no customer could possibly use all the bandwidth.

Sigs that are ads create conflict of interest. The commentor may make a useless comment just so the ad will be seen. That decreases the utility of discussions for everyone.

How does Powweb compare for hosting?

GoDaddy is extremely aggressive about pushing things people don't need, in my opinion. The company seems to me to take advantage of people with less technical understanding by exploiting their doubt. For example, there are sometimes as many as 30 ads on a GoDaddy screen at one time, so many it is difficult to navigate.

But for the search "Strategic solutions for a complex world" *I* see some web hosting site as #1. Could you explain the discrepancy? Is it possible that the Google results differ from time to time or from location to location?

My hosting company (PowWeb) has PHP4 and 5 running side by side, and lots and lots of handy extension, I program exclusively for PHP5

I will check and see how Dreamhost compares with Powweb. Powweb accounts are $7.77/month and allow "2 Gigs Disk Space (Raid Storage) and 5 Gigs/Day Data Transfer/Bandwidth (per day, not month)."

Powweb works pretty well.

They only have ONE plan though.

2GB storage, 5GB (daily) transfer
$7.77 a month

Frontpage, email, php, mysql they have all that included.

not that anyone will be reading this thread so late, and even if they do my message will be at the bottom of the pile, but the US constitution is only valid for government. It holds no real power for the people anymore whatsoever (and never really did).

take the time to read through this link.

http://nodebts.temp.powweb.com/theseries/part1.txt

then go to page2 etc etc...

I have no experience with any of the BSDs, but it seems to me that FreeBSD is the most popular with ISPs. That means that any programs you write will run on the web host computer. For example, Powweb. (I'm a customer, but have no other connection with them.)

Last year I wrote a similar program to Michael Zalewski's with the intent to test browsers AND operating systems security. IE's parser held up fairly well so I didn't pursue testing other "more stable" browsers. However, I did find a few holes in IE like:

IFRAME application/x-www-form-urlencoded> (which will crash pre-IE 6 browsers. It appears to overflow shlwapi.dll)

Next I turned the program to the O.S. and found that Windows coughs on

CALC inp11111111111 (Enter this at in run or from a command prompt)

To download my program and/or see more examples go to http://robohoba.temp.powweb.com/publications/bforc e.html

Proof that the ONLY way to approach thorough and complete code/program security is through brute force.

I should have mentioned not to use Yahoo, also. Yahoo has shown itself to be very adversarial also, with its tricky practices opting users into receiving ads.

He could give free email accounts using Powweb as a web host. (650 email accounts allowed for $7.77 per month.) Powweb seems to be the best web hosting provider. Since all the mail would be coming from and going to his own domain, it can't be blocked. Isn't that a complete solution?

He could provide instructions to prospective customers about how to configure a new account in each of several email clients. He could tell them to use only their new account to communicate with him. Since the email activity would be only Powweb moving messages from one of their computers to another, there is unlikely to be any loss. (It's easy for a customer to know if he didn't successfully transmit a message to the Powweb ISP, because he will get an immediate error message.)

Sorry, I thought the point of my message would be clear. Someone wrote a long article about why people should not host their own web sites. It's scary to see all the reasons together. Unfortunately I'm working on something for a customer, and I don't have the link easily available.

Powweb provides 650 email addresses.

Powweb provides control over DNS. I have run programs I've written on a Powweb server. However, it is not clear to me if you could have complete control and run your own DNS server on their computer. You must be able to provide a program that runs under FreeBSD, the Powweb OS.

When all is considered, it is a huge hassle to run your own server, if you want reliable operation and you aren't just using it for learning and testing. Do you want to get out of bed at 3 AM when someone finds some vulnerability that you didn't patch yet? If the answer is no, let the web hosting company do the updates.

Maybe this reply is not of use to you, but I'm guessing that it will be of use to many that read this Slashdot article. Comments must be written for everyone, not just the original poster.

The functionality and the security updates all cost only $7.77 a month. Ping times are low. 65 Gigs of transfer. One Gigabyte of storage.

I don't have any connection with Powweb other than as a customer. Here is another of Powweb's customers, one of the largest sellers of contemporary art in the world, a company with the odd name of The Real Mother Goose.

For web serving, try Powweb. You can't run your own web server nearly as well. It's $7.77 a month.

thats at powweb.com btw

PowWeb FreeBSD hosting, $7.77 per month, has been good to me. The tech support is a little squirrely. It took them a week to discover why a compiled Perl program I wrote was not working. They found that someone had changed the OS without logging the change.

Sorry, but you can't pay more than $7.77 per month, when you pay on a yearly basis. I know that $30 per month would make many people feel more secure.

>I've been using One2Host[one2host.com] for the past 6 months for my personal site. Reliability isn't the greatest though, sometimes it's very slow, other times I get host timeouts.

And to think, for 7.77$/month you could be hosted on powweb. Great reliability, great speed, loads of space and features. They even took care of that whole "domain registration" thingy for me.

And no, I won't post my website URL here, don't wanna risk a /. effect. ^_^

I use PowWeb for much the same thing. Only $7.77 a month, very fast, extremely easy to use 'Ops' interface, awesome customer service, and great web service.

I don't use much of the web services, I just put up a crappy little website to publish my resume and to play with SSI stuff.

They give you 50 POP accounts, 100 e-mail forwarding address, 100MB of disk space, 12 gigs of data transfer a month, and a real DNS manager. Check out their Service Comparison page for more info.

If ya go for it, put me in as a referral! I'll take the free 2 months they'll give. :)

I use PowWeb for much the same thing. Only $7.77 a month, very fast, extremely easy to use 'Ops' interface, awesome customer service, and great web service.

I don't use much of the web services, I just put up a crappy little website to publish my resume and to play with SSI stuff.

They give you 50 POP accounts, 100 e-mail forwarding address, 100MB of disk space, 12 gigs of data transfer a month, and a real DNS manager. Check out their Service Comparison page for more info.

If ya go for it, put me in as a referral! I'll take the free 2 months they'll give. :)