Slashdot Mirror

There are several examples on the net. This is one of my favorites.

There were some people who built an autonomous glider which could perform many of the things you mention (with the notable exception of powered flight), including flying pre-programmed routes while taking photos (as well as navigating to specified coordinates autonomously). The process of building and testing it is documented in a fair amount of detail, including information on choices made for the on board electronics.

I have no particular interest in building aircraft, and still thought that page was a good read.

I have Shaw's "High-Speed Xtreme-I" in Calgary, and regularly max my download speed out at 1.8MB/s. So I actually seem to be able to get above their "up to" limit. YMMV, etc.

In Edmonton for $93.00CA there is shaw's High-Speed Warp that gives you
# Up to 25 Mbps download speed
# Up to 2 Mbps upload speed
# 150 GB/month data transfer (Thats a bit better than 20 GB but by no means unlimited.)
I just don't know what the hell "UP TO" means.

http://www.shaw.ca/en-ca/AboutShaw/TermsofUse/AcceptableUsePolicyInternet.htm#q8

Wow, sucks to be you...

It's not nearly that bad in Canada.

Similar idea but much cooler way of retrieving the equipment: http://www.members.shaw.ca/sonde/

Shaw is now offering 100 Mbps down / 5 Mbps up in Saskatoon (Saskatchewan) @ $250

http://www.shaw.ca/en-ca/ProductsServices/Internet/Nitro/?WT.mc_id=C53A300S38

To steep for me but glad to see that DOCSIS 3.0 is being rolled out, I am sure prices will come down eventually

Yup, just RS-232 with TTL matching circuitry. A little board like this one does just fine although you do have to give the board +5VDC and jumper TX/RX to the appropriate pins on the drive. For the 7200.11s, there is a block of four pins adjacent to the SATA data connector on the back of the drive - the pin closest to the SATA connector is RX, and the one right next to it is TX. Note that this will just give you a terminal interface to the controller, as opposed to letting you actually use the drive for its intended purpose.

This is just freakin' cool.

Fry's isn't open at this hour, but I built one of those a few years ago and dug it out of my parts box, and yes, you can talk to the bare metal of the drive this way. (Failing that, I found a schematic that does the same thing with a 74LS14, seeing as how most serial ports can speak TTL now by default!)

Anyways, looks like there are commands for diagnostics, memory peeking/poking, raw sector reads/writes, the works. 38400 8N1, or 9600 8N1. (Googling around, looks like some Samsung drives with Marvell "CPU"s like 57600 8N1)

Got the T> prompt, level "T" meaning "T"ests, and you can "Q"uery it. There appears to be self-help, pressing "?".

/A, /C, /1..9, seems to change command levels
At level C (F3 C&gt prompt, "F3" refers to the architecture, "C" refers to the level), you can get a list of all commands with "Q", for Query.
^V echoes commands on, useful.
^C resets/spinsdown the drive.

More googling...

Looks like there are two groups of people: One group of Eastern European hackers intent on protecting their commercial ability to do data recovery -- there's an expensive but slick GUI wrapper around some of the common fixes, and everyone in Eastern Europe (I wound up in a Russian and a Polish forum) seems friendly enough to talk about hacking the terminal interface, but (obviously) doesn't want to give a cookbook answer. (I do kinda respect the "Read between the lines of our hints and you'll eventually figure it out!" attitude, though. :)

For instance, the tail end of this video (which is basically the "cookbook" answer for the commercial product, and provides a lot of hints at the DIY solution -- the video doesn't show the commands being sent via the terminal window, as I guess that'd make it too easy :)... but the status window of the commercial tool, plus the status bits at the bottom of the GUI screen, makes it clear what's going on. Specificlaly, the status log shows the results of commands that have arguments that look an awful lot like the ones that the drive's self-help output, like this one:
Level T m: Rev 0001.0000, Flash, FormatPartition, m[Partition],[FormatOpts],[DefectListOpts],[MaxWrRetryCnt],[MaxRdRetryCnt],[MaxEccTLevel],[MaxCertifyTrkRewrit es],[ValidKey]

The video also shows some drive (or drive board?) powering on/off activity. These appear to be the level 2 commands "U" (SpinUpDrive), "Z" (SpinDownDrive), and/or the level 1 command "e" (SpinDownAndResetDrive. And/or some other commands that I haven't figured out, to power down the drive so that the PCB can be removed for the BSY fix, then power it back up again after the PCB's plugged back into the "drive" half of the drive.

Not sure if those are the same as the power on/off things the video is showing, or if there are other commands to control power. Also not sure about things like SmartControl, (level 1 "N"), but maybe that's how to clear things like the SMART list (/1 to get to level 1, then N1 to clear it?)

There also appears to be a fairly active thread at msfn.org about a "Look, just hook the drive up to a serial port, and be careful not to make any typos, and remember that all the control-characters are case-sensitive" sor

Don't laugh. Our office manager is from Germany and has never heard of The Onion. Thanks to this clip's staggeringly high production values, she was thoroughly confused - especially since she didn't see the clip until after the keynote. When I asked her if she knew what The Onion was and she said no, I showed her this classic, and she figured it out pretty quick.

Bullshit you don't have Fox. I'm in Winnipeg and we've got Fox. Yours probably comes from Seattle

You really need to spend a few minutes doing reading and research before you post (and do some proofreading of your bad grammar and drop the crass tone - It makes you sound less intelligent).

I'm in Vancouver, and I have Shaw's "Classic Cable" package. It doesn't have Fox, and I've never watched Fox.

http://www.shaw.ca/en-ca/ProductsServices/Television/Cable/ClassicCable.htm

Internet speeds are plenty fast for trading BD rips ... Even at full quality they are only about 30Mbps on average

I think you meant to say they average 30 gigabytes. Sure, this torrent of Pirates of the Caribbean At World's End is 30.38 gigabytes.

So 30.38 gig is 31,109.12 megabytes. If you are really getting continuous download speeds of 10 Mbps, that works out to 1221 kilobytes per second, or 1.2 megabytes per second. 31,109.12/1.2=25924 seconds, or a little over seven hours.

Not bad I suppose if you are getting those speeds. You could get it while you sleep.

The local cable monopoly provider gushes in the marketing materials for their "Extreme" package "With an extremely fast download speed of up to 10 Mbps ..." which - again - would be 1221 kilobytes per second, but I have that package and I never see speeds like that. What I do get is pretty consistent 150 - 300 KB/s, with bursts of up to 450 KB/s, usually at the beginning of the transfer. Other's mileage may vary, but I would be surprised to see 1221 KB/sec sustained for the duration of a 30 gig download, my ISP's marketing propaganda notwithstanding.

Oh, and they cap me at something like 100 GB of throughput per month. The (slower) DSL alternative I was using before gave me more (I think 200, maybe?) but even that would get you fewer than seven movies per month, if you did nothing else on the Internet.

Storing them would be costly, too, unless you delete them as soon as you watch them, or burn them to discs (are there even burners out there yet? I'm not really up on the subject). I don't know. Maybe there are faster options with higher caps that I am not aware of, but I don't think it's quite there.

Telus and Shaw in BC are both 60GB for basic service. Not to be confused with the 'Lite' service they both have, capped at 10GB.

http://www.telus.com/portalWeb/inlineLink/CP_SCS/Product/Internet/High_Speed/Compare/High_Speed_Plans_and_Prices/?_region=BC
http://www.shaw.ca/en-ca/ProductsServices/Internet/

Honestly skreeech, you should take the few seconds to look it up if you're going to post "facts" here for everyone to read. It's just courtesy.

Canada is in the same situation as US, and there are often bandwidth caps too; Shaw for exampel have these plans:
High-speed internet Lite (256kbps with max 10GB/month) CAD $22/month (standalone $29.95)
High-speed (5mbps with max 60GB/month) CAD $32/month (standalone $40.95)
High-Speed Xtreme-I (10mbps with max 100GB/month) CAD $42/month (standalone $50.95)
High-Speed Nitro (25mbps with max 150GB/month) CAD $93/month (standalone 101.95)

Source http://www.shaw.ca/en-ca/ProductsServices/Internet/ (prices from each service sub-page)

I live in Edmonton, AB, Canada. Our real only choice is to use the cable provided internet service from Shaw.ca. They have a service which claims to double your download speed. This uses software to temporarily increase your bandwidth from anything from 10 to 20 seconds, and barely makes any difference to a download. Unless you are willing to spend $93.00 a month for increased bandwidth, which is nonsense considering that all speeds depend on the server and hops and remote latency. Check out the services at http://www.shaw.ca/en-ca/ProductsServices/Internet/Nitro/ I'm outraged that the service that I used to pay $40.00/month now costs over $50.00, and my current service for the same price has dropped to less than dsl speeds - as a current customer I am not qualified to receive any of the 'free' or 'discounted' services and to upgrade my service I have to buy the modem that they are giving away.

Once, with 5 days to go, and Shaw's customer service site reporting that my monthly usage was only 30GB that month......

Shaw has a site where you can track your usage? Where do I find that?

https://secure.shaw.ca/

Log in (if you've registered with the site already; it's a separate login), and click Your Modem Usage.

I made a modified version of this with some wire, cardboard, and tin foil. Works great. I have a house and this is used on the first floor, mounted right beside a window: http://members.shaw.ca/hdtvantenna/

Beyond being dirt cheap that's a horrible antenna. The length of the dipole sets the frequency where the antenna is most sensitive. The instructions say 28 cm, which is ~1 GHz. That's too high a frequency, so antenna should be longer. Dipoles have a pretty narrow bandwidth. The distance between the reflector and the antenna is also frequency sensitive. Having it the wrong distance away can make things worse instead of better. Generally you'd want it 3/4 of a wavelength away from the antenna. There's no need for the reflector to be an entire plate. A single wire of the correct length at the right distance works just as well. You can also use wire as a directer. Also missing is antenna matching. There are cheap ways to make a balun that will greatly improve reception. Anyway, that's just the basics. There are plenty of great HAM websites that explain how to make a cheap yagi, which would work much better.

I made a modified version of this with some wire, cardboard, and tin foil. Works great. I have a house and this is used on the first floor, mounted right beside a window:
http://members.shaw.ca/hdtvantenna/

I am in the process of making this, but the first one works so well, I've kind of put it off...(at least until after the Olympics):
http://www.metacafe.com/watch/762088/coat_hanger_hdtv_antenna_better_than_store_bought_amazing/

The key is that they are directional, to be fair, I do have to turn it around a lot for certain stations, but where I'm at they are all more or less due south.

I have used my Linksys (not a WRT54G, so 'upgrading' it to Linux probably won't work) router's QoS feature to assign high priority to the MAC address of the Vonage box, low priority to the BitTorrent box, and medium quality to everything else,

Check for firmware updates for your router. Consider purchasing a new router. At most it will help a bit.

which helps a little, but not enough.

As you've noticed, evidently.

Is there a router out there that would allow me to reserve, say, 75-90kbps of bandwidth off the top for VOIP and never, ever allow any application to use that, regardless of whether there's a VOIP call going on at the moment or not?"

Well, first off that would be a pretty stupid waste of capacity. And secondly, no, if the packets are flooding in from the outside, even if your router is rejecting them, they are still flooding in saturating the pipe.

There are 2 things you can do:

1) Throttle down your bittorrent at your end, to limit its download rate. That will keep peers from saturating your incoming link.

2a) Contact your ISP and see if they offer QoS service, which means they will prioritize your VOIP packets through their network, and their routers.

Shaw in Canada for example offers it for $10/mo

http://www.shaw.ca/en-ca/ProductsServices/Internet/Internet+Explained/QoSVoIP.htm

In theory this is the best solution. In practice, its somewhat controversial.

Some have alleged shaw and other ISPs deliberately manipulate competitors voip traffic to promote its own voip offering. While this is possible, in my experience that isn't the case at all [at least with shaw].

Others allege that its a 'scam' to let shaw squeeze more money out of people and has no effect. But to counter that I have heard of cases where people have found QoS made a big difference.

Still others claim that QoS should be free and automatically applied to real-time apps like voip, video chat, etc and refuse to pay for it. But that's a separate economics issue.

In my case (on Shaw) I use primus voip and have no trouble, except when torrenting, but throttling my torrents seems to generally resolve the issue, and I've never tried their QoS service. I also mostly torrent at night.

Personally, I think they should mass produce more of those rovers and blast them off to mars.... spirit and opportunity were sent to two very boring places on mars that were deemed as safe as possible to land after so many previous failures.

I agree, a bunch of Sojourner-sized rovers (without the lander pod) should be sent to higher-risk areas. The "ice-trees" and "ice-tubes" would be additional cool places to visit besides the ones you listed. If they have a dozen or so, scientists & engineers would be less nervous about going to interesting but risky places.

• Our landline switches have access points for third party long distance switches interconnecting with ours. This allows for long distance competition.
  
  
• Our landline switches also have access points for third party telephone company switches, for example Shaw has telephone service in my city. Rogers and SaskTel mobility also provice local service.
  
  
• Although we don't have any, third party unbundled loop CLECs are allowed to lease space in our COs to directly provice traditional copper based services like phone or DSL from their own equipment.
  
  
• Our IP core network allows for multiple backhauls onto the internet, so you can lease DSL ports from SaskTel and use your own internet connection for the backhaul. If you're a SaskTel DSL customer you get SaskTel's default backhaul.
  
  

I can only speak for my ISP in Canada (Shaw). They throttle Bit Torrent on the default ports it would appear, but not on any other ports. (This is based on my own informal speed tests.)

If the last (and coolest) thing I do with my life commits "us Terrans" to serious levels of ongoing space and interplanetary exploration, it would be worth the effort (er, sacrifice).

What you said. All of it. With one addendum: Wouldn't it be even cooler to take advantage of the opportunity to do something that even balls-of-steel, goes-clank-when-he-walks, but Neil Armstrong didn't?

If the FCC doesn't like your speech (or the first image you hold in front of the camera :), what are they gonna do? Fly a team of goons over to Mars to arrest you? Hey, go right ahead! It'll force NASA's hand into sending a resupply ship, a return ship, and/or developing cheaper heavy lift vehicles! Win, win, win, and win!

Laugh for the day: The MP3 of what Armstrong could have done.

I don't know why more people that want to use 'unlimited' bandwidth, and not have ports blocked, etc....don't just get a business connection??

To verify this:

First, the rumours passed around from urban legends.

Now his SAT scores from CNN were 566 verbal and 640 math.

And from here we have a setup of pre-1974 SAT scores against IQ.

His score of 1206 combined sets him up with an IQ of about 130.

Now, from the IQ we can look at a distrubution of IQ versus percentage of people with such an IQ to see where a 130 IQ puts you, and it's in the top 2.5% of people.

Bush has been a terrible president and will probably be the first president to preside over 2 recessions but he isn't stupid.

To verify this:

First, the rumours passed around from urban legends.

Now his SAT scores from CNN were 566 verbal and 640 math.

And from here we have a setup of pre-1974 SAT scores against IQ.

His score of 1206 combined sets him up with an IQ of about 130.

Now, from the IQ we can look at a distrubution of IQ versus percentage of people with such an IQ to see where a 130 IQ puts you, and it's in the top 2.5% of people.

Bush has been a terrible president and will probably be the first president to preside over 2 recessions but he isn't stupid.

No, because he isn't offensive in the least.

The only ways he could even be considered "stereotypical" is his name and accent.

When I inform them that they need their own, they ask how much. I inform them of AVG and ClamAv* and that those two are at no cost. They then state they cannot be any good if they are free and they go buy either Norton or McAfee.

Perhaps you should listen to them. Many ISPs do provide free antivirus software as part of their service. Its true that you do still have to install it, but that's a separate issue.

For example, in my area, we have Shaw for cable, and Telus for DSL:

Shaw: Shaw Secure (powered by F-secure)
  https://secure.shaw.ca/apps/shawsecure/

Telus: Telus Internet Security (powered by Zero Knowledge Systems)
  http://about.telus.com/bav/jumpL5.html

Both are free as part of your broadband service subscription.

As an added bonus, if a user has a problem with either package the ISP customer support will provide them free phone support. Both ISPs phone support, while manned by your typical CS monkeys, is quite responsive, and usually able to handle most basic problems, and is far better than what I've seen users get from Norton and McAfee et al.

If you happen to be a telus or shaw subscriber I wouldn't hesitate to recommend using either of their free packages. You -are- paying for them. I have nothing against ClamAV or AVG, but having them call their ISP instead of us for first level support is worth it. :)

cheers

As I commented on http://blogs.zdnet.com/microsoft/?p=794

---
Gates explained it in 1998

I voted for "To try to grow IE 7's marketshare by adding software pirates to the count"; to partially quote what Bill Gates said in 1998:

"we want them to steal ours. They'll get sort of addicted, and then we'll somehow figure out how to collect"

http://www.news.com/2100-1023-212942.html

The 'addiction' can only happen if IE7 gets a vast-majority market share like IE6 had.

Now look at http://members.shaw.ca/Limulus/files/w3sbw2-0706.png

The numbers from w3schools.com aren't necessarily indicative of the overall web, but I've found the trends they show are.

Compared to the IE5 -> IE6 transition which was rapid and fairly X shaped on the graph, the IE6 -> IE7 tansition has stalled, with IE7 having plateaued at a level *less* than IE6.

This is very bad for Microsoft, as it represents a prolonged vulnerable state. Since IE6 and 7 are different enough that they need to be treated separately by developers, the difference in market share between IE7 and Firefox is small enough that website developers must take the latter into account too and thus support it (even if you take the Net Applications numbers http://marketshare.hitslink.com/report.aspx?qprid=6 to be fully accurate, and I don't, you'll note that the ratio of FF:IE7:IE6 is about 2:5:6. If it was all IE6, that would be 2:11) And if Firefox is supported, there will be less sites that are IE-specific, meaning less 'addiction' to IE.
---

From the link:
"a deep-cycle battery is designed to discharge down to as much as 80% of its charge capacity"

80% is not "almost completely".

I may be wrong but I think that it should be it can be discharged up to 80%, in other words until it only hold 20% of it's charge. I think this page does it better:

Deep cycle batteries are designed to be discharged down as much as 80% time after time, and have much thicker plates.

if you actually had any experience with deep cycle batteries, you'd know that discharging past 50% drastically reduces the lifespan

"A good quality deep cycle lead acid battery will cost between $50 and $200 and, if properly maintained, will give you at least 150 deep discharge cycles."

"All the articles I read on battery usage recommended that lead-acid batteries not be discharged to a point where less than 20% of capacity remains."

Canadian ISP's publish precisely what the limit is, and my ISP, Shaw, even provides graphs update bi-hourly showing your exact MTD usage down to the MB, so you know almost exactly how much is remaining for the month. I merely go to http://secure.shaw.ca/ , type in my account info, and I can view them. They, directly on their product page, give the exact difference between download caps between their different offerings, with the lowest one having 60GB a month, and the highest having 160GB (the middle one has 100GB).

I've also gone up to 10% over on a few months, and even then they didn't do anything.

Furthermore, most of the people whom I've talked to (which is many considering I work for a Canadian ISP) don't know what their bandwidth cap is, and don't come CLOSE to using it. This isn't surprising, considering most customers use the internet primarily for web browsing/online shopping, MSN (MSN is easily the most dominant IM service in Canada), gaming and music sharing. Movie sharing is still relatively limited and not used by most people, and any video service outside of Youtube has a rather limited reach.

Slashdot readers may use a whole giant crap-load of bandwidth, but the vast majority of the other 99.99% of the population don't use all that much.

When services like Joost and other HD services that use bittorrent, or even ones that don't, become more pervasive and mainstream, thus bringing higher bandwidth usage to most consumers....then the ISP's are gonna be having problems. Right now though, any fears that people will intentionally use up all of their bandwidth are, quite frankly, ridiculous.

Well, what I was getting at is the fact that there is ONE big fiber pipeline here in Vancouver that gives us our connection to the net. If the building that operates that key hub is destroyed, all of western Canada will probably lose net connectivity (unless there are other tier 1 connections I don't know about). To me, that is completely unreasonable. Not to mention that in Canada, only two main companies provide broadband. Telus and Shaw. Even if you go with a reseller, you're still on either on Telus infrastructure or Shaw (Rogers) infrastructure. Here's a great example of why this is bad: Shaw blocks all outgoing connections on port 25 for all residential customers. Oh, want to use mail.yourownwebsite.com for your mail? Too bad... either use Shaw's outgoing mail servers, or upgrade to a business-grade connection from Shaw. Hmm OK, that sure sucks. I guess I'll switch to Telus. Oh nevermind, they also block port 25, among others.

What better way to make sure Scaled's new owners can keep their new technologies under wraps.

Upside: Next round of warfare, we win. Enemy doesn't even have a clue why.
Downside: I don't get to spend my kids' retirement on a holiday in low earth orbit.

And yet, I'm more saddened by the downside than I'm intrigued by the upside.

Maybe it's because we woulda wasted the enemy no matter how few of my tax dollars the government took from me, but spending a weekend in low earth orbit (never mind the fucking moon) has been on my "List Of Things To Do Before I Die" since well before puberty.

My condolences to the families of the dead and injured. To the living: If NOC fucks you over, quit and wait for your non-compete contracts to expire. Then rebuild. If NOC doesn't fuck you over, keep building.

Whether NOC fucks you over or not, please, please, please, for the love of Dobbs, get us off this fucking rock.

Even if only for a weekend.

When I worked at the helpdesk of a small ISP, we were approached by this company to see if we were interested in letting them test their ad-inserting proxy server on our customers. I protested that it was scummy and might lead to legal trouble (I was guessing) over changing pages in-flight, but my bosses didn't listen. That was back in 2002 or 2003, and I left shortly after to take another job. No idea what's going on there now.

I'm moving to a new ISP since my current one has started blocking port 25 in and out. I run my own mail server, so I appreciate that Uniserve's TOS explicitly allow servers (clause #19). However, they also explicitly say that they insert ads:

65. UNISERVE shall have the right, without notice, to insert advertising data into the Internet browser used by a UNSERVE customer, and transferred to a UNISERVE customer over UNISERVE's network, so long as this does not involve UNISERVE establishing the identity of the customer to whom such data is sent.

Needless to say I'm not happy about that, but in Vancouver my choices are limited: Telus (who'll censor web pages if they belong to a union striking against them), Shaw, or a handful of small ADSL ISPs that all seem to be much the same. Uniserve seems the best of a bad bunch.

Which ISPs? Will their helpdesk help me set up my p2p program so I can download some tunes?

Yes, good thing they didn't. After all where else on earth do you have coins called" Loonies and Toonies EH? The poppy has been a symbol of canada and all other communist countries for years. I do not blame the contractors for finding it weird. The quality of the colouring of the poppy is so poor, that you can sctratch it with a nail pretty much. The poppy coins were a "special" edition coin created in commemoration of the veterans and the wars. A lot of money was invested (so each "poppy" coin actually was worth about 27 cents) from the taxpayers money to put the ugly things in circulation. Let's hope nothing stupid like that ever happens again.

wanna see the coin? http://members.shaw.ca/collectibles101/photos8/qua rter.JPG

The quarter is the fourth one down on this page.

Here is what canadian shaw basic analog cable looks like on a TV with a good resolution scalar. I called shaw, and they did not know the resolution off hand.. it is like 330x262 interlaced to 330x525 or something. There is no motion artifacts, clayface, pixelation, strobing going on. As a matter of fact, using a geforce2mx and 640x480 and in Zoom mode, YouTube looks very good on this TV. On a twice as inexpensive acer 32" HD LCD everything very unwatchable, even DVD's. Sony might be evil and there are lots of TVs with good scalers, but this is two years old already, and it was money well spent. Sony 32" ..XBR1 LCD with wega engine=scaling processor.

http://members.shaw.ca/pizpot/sd/ It looks better in person when moving of course.

Shaw on the west coast does this as well. They do have varying rates from 10GB/month - 150GB/month for home users. Some of their prices are pretty scary though.

• Lite: $20/mnth 256Kb dn 128Kb up - 10GB total per month
• High Speed: $30/mnth 5Mb dn 512Kb up - 60GB per month
• Xtreme: $42/mnth 10Mb dn 1Mb up - 100GB per month
• Nitro: $93/mnth 25Mb dn 1Mb up - 150GB per month

And maybe you shouldn't hide behind a blanket af anonymity... And perhaps some articles/proofs to back up your statement?
I will admit, I was misinformed about the Shaw/Rogers connection. (My God, I am admitting I was wrong, and on /. no less)
Shaw digital phone may be based off of VoIP technology, but as described in their own technology background sheets http://www.shaw.ca/NR/rdonlyres/05BA28F2-725D-468F -AD59-5D72E4DA2747/0/DPTechBackgrounder.pdf, the digital phone goes directly from their network to the public telephone system, bypassing the internet completely. According to this http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voip, VoIP requires as active internet connection, which is untrue of the Shaw service.
Which means, that although Shaw digital phone is based off of VoIP technology, by defenition, it is not a VoIP phone.

Not that I am defending their traffic-shaping ways, but just to set the record straight.

Look at the control system depicted here, and weep - geeks!

http://members.shaw.ca/sonde/

see here..... http://members.shaw.ca/sonde/ [members.shaw.ca]

Post some new news!

Model helicopters and model thermal soarers both have used this technology for the past 20 years. In the case of thermal soarers, which may launch at over 1k ft, an Out-of Sight (OOS) control system is essential.

What about that Canadian floating gliders to the edge of space on balloons and then having them find their way back home? http://members.shaw.ca/sonde/

What about that New Zealander making a home built cruise missile? http://www.interestingprojects.com/cruisemissile/

When I want to read history, I'll go to a history of technology board!

Shaw hasn't been advertising unlimited use for a long time (years). So you get what you pay for. More ISPs should do this. It's a lot better to actually know the real limit and have the ability to select a package that's better suited for your bandwidth use.

For example, the average package is 60GB per month and the highest residential package is 150GB/month. http://www.shaw.ca/en-ca/ProductsServices/Internet /ShawHighSpeedInternet/

Since this change I've never been contacted by them and I tend to download a lot.

I live in Winnipeg, Manitoba, population about 600,000, which is in Canada for the less well reasearched.

First, thanks for your reply, you are pointing out reality better than my slant about no competition.

But, i was talking about meaningful, high-bandwidth competition. I currently use Shaw, a cable service, which provides me, at extra cost, with 10Mbps down, 1Mbps up. It's less at peak times, and getting worse. The last few days i've been downloading (from a computer at my ISP's office) 120KB/s (about 1Mbps) between 20:00 and 23:00. Even though i paid the extra for "X-treme".

So, i could go with DSL from MTS, but then it'd get only 400kbps up, and 3Mbps down. Plus, i'd have to run PPPoE, which resets every 24 hours, altering my IP address (extremely annoying for hobbiests, and completely pointless, too).

I can get oversubscribed wireless, T1s, Dial-up and ISDN. But those are all bad options, either for cost or performance.

There are also no major alternate DSL or Cable ISPs in the market, not that i'm aware of.

In other countries (Japan) people can get real, 100Mbps fibre connections, for $50/month. I want that. I thought my country had world-class communications. Well, we used to, with our phone system, but our internet is only fair, i would judge.

You can stop waiting now. Does it really matter whose soil it was on? Canadian soldiers are still dying in Iraq to this day, fighting for your cause.

And in regards to the above link, before you say something snappy like "only 24 Canadians", let me ask you something: in your opinion, what number of innocent lives lost is sufficient enough to deem a tragedy? That's a rhetorical question, by the way.