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FYI: As of July 2000, according to Fortune Magazine, GE Corp. has the 40th largest economy in the world.

This is still smaller than Toyota, Exxon-Mobil, the big US Automobile makers, Wal Mart, Finland, Saudi Arabia and Poland.

But it is larger than Portugal, Venezuela, Iran, Israel, Egypt, IBM, Volkswagon and AT&T.

And GE is only 2.6X bigger than the 100th largest economy. But I do believe you're right in saying that 1% of it is similar to some small 3rd world nation.

If you look at the most ticketed city in the world - Edmonton, Alberta, Canada - there are over 200,000 speeding tickets written per year. This is certainly not normal, and it certainly didn't start out this way. This is also a city that, incidentally, has the highest number of traffic lights in North America.

The intention of photo radar was to create traffic safety, but it has done nothing of the sort. Traffic violation seem to keep going up and up, as this webpage will tell you so is the revenue, from $3.5M in 1995 to $14M in 2001. What's worse, photo radar violations don't stop the driver from speeding, nor are the fines used for driver reeducation. They go straight back to the Edmonton Police where they are used to attempt to buy $4M dog kennels and retirement getaways for retired cops in Arizona.

Red light cameras were then installed with the intention of preventing accidents and catching offenders who would race through red lights. There are at least 37 red light camera today locations in a city of 620,000 people. Now the police have floated the idea of using them not only for red light cameras, but for enforcement of speed at all times.

Some of you are going to say "well don't break the law and you won't get caught" but that's not the problem. The problem is that the government and police have alterior motives. Its mandate under normal circumstances should be to serve its citizens, but who is being served when drivers can continue to act at that moment and not find out until weeks later that they violated the law?

One could extrapolate this scenario to monitoring of citizens using a large database. Maybe they'll start photographing from the front and see who's driving the car. Maybe insurance companies would like to raise someone's rates for lending their car to a friend. You know that corporations could eventually get their dirty paws on this information, with some "anonymous filtering" ruse. Maybe some racial profiling? Send cops into areas in real time when a [insert ethnicity here] goes into a [insert other ethnicity here] neighborhood?

Nobody needs this. Not in the UK and certainly not in Edmonton. The balance of its capability does not serve legitimate interests. If you don't fight against it, you are accepting it at face value.

Yahoo MegaSquirt Group This has the message archives, files, and links to MS related sites.

MegaSquirt FAQ This is the place that you should look for answers before sending to the list. If it hasn't been asked here, Lance is more than happy to add the Q/A to the FAQ. It's very well organized and will take a novice through the whole process.

Since Bruce and Al's site was already linked, I'll forego that link. The best place to start is the Yahoo group, since it really is the nexus.

Just a couple of quick bits. If you are planning on using GM TBI injectors, get some 2 ohm 25 watt ballast resistors FIRST.

Second, if you are planning on using a distributor for the tach signal, you are best off by using the hall sensor directly. A lot of VAG vehicles have reported noise problems on the tach signal.

These are really the only 2 things I'd want to caution about first.

All in all, the MegaSquirt is a good system for DIYers because it bypasses all of the complexity of factory systems. You can use it with most factory sensors and it performs great. One of the bread and butter applications is replacing CIS with EFI, many people have done it.

BTW, my engine is the 1991 CBR 600 F2 engine on the IT Runs! page.

Some people are replacing stock computers in more modern cars for performance reasons, and some are putting them in older cars, and getting some impressive results. And, yes, you can hook up a laptop for on-the-fly tweaking. Now I want a car.

Granted there weren't tons of developers reviewing KDE, but it was the core developers. The people who know the code the best. How is that not a security audit on a large open source project?

check this out

this blows my load...

http://members.shaw.ca/tylerv2/dawn/

He's supposed to be getting more all the time. Check back regularly!

You're welcome...

Something similar

You should read the weekly KDE CVS Digest if you're so eager to read about new features.

George W. Bush got a verbal score of 566 and a math score of 640, for a combined score of 1206. According to this site, this means he has an IQ of approximately 129. This places him in the 97th percentile, assuming a normal gaussian distribution with mean 100 standard deviation of 15, or the 96th percentile, assuming a standard deviation of 16.

George W. Bush got a verbal score of 566 and a math score of 640, for a combined score of 1206. According to this site, this means he has an IQ of approximately 129. This places him in the 97th percentile, assuming a normal gaussian distribution with mean 100 standard deviation of 15, or the 96th percentile, assuming a standard deviation of 16.

For audio, buy a decent digital-analog converter like stereolink. This replaces your soundcard, and plugs into your computer on one end, and your home audio on the other. You can then attach massive home speakers or whatever you want

The whole thing ends up looking like this: stereo

I would've thought it would be the other way around. Megatron has a huge wang, but Optimus Prime have none to speak of.

Transformers porn.

The first paragraph is enough to make your eyes bleed.

Heh...sorry. I live in Japan...don't see too many of either of those company's cars over here. Oh well...

I bet you do and just don't know it. For instance, Toyota sells Chevrolet's Cavalier/Pontiac's Sunfire under the Toyota name in Japan . As well, GM and Ford own or cooperate with many other brands (Ford owns or works with other brands like Volvo, Jaguar, Mazda, and even Aston Martin, while GM has brands that include Saad, Opel, and Hummer). You may not see Mustangs or Corvettes, but chances are you see a number of Ford or GM cars every day. The same holds true for many other car makers like Chrysler/Mercedes-Benz/Daimler/Dodge/Mitsubishi, Volkswagen/Audi/Porsche/Lamborghini (Porsche is indpendent, but shares parts and designs with VW and Audi, the rest are part of the Volkswagen Automotive Group, and so on (that's ignoring the low-end/high-end relationships like Honda/Acura, Toyota/Lexus, Nissan/Infiniti, etc).

This makes me question whether EA would ever be a good place to work as a programmer.

The child is real. The clone stamp tool, leaves a tell tale path behind it, seen here

TextWrangler is a tweener that's not all that practical. The problem boils down to the fact that BBEdit Lite is free, BBEdit is worth the money if you need an UltraEdit equivalent on the Mac, and the in-between niches are already fairly well taken up by other free alternatives. Luckily for BareBones, I think they just have to pick out some bits of BBEdit and they can "release" TextWrangler more or less for free. It's not like they're really out anything for releasing this, and it brings the flagship a little more exposure (and highlights some of its lesser known features).

Most of the features (which can be found listed in comparison to BBEdit Lite here) aren't things you'll need in a true text editor. I mean come on, how much code do you hack that's in Unicode? Rather, of the people that do hack code, how many of *them* need Unicode? And if you're hacking Unicode and need spellcheck (ie, not coding at all), well, you're better off (if only b/c you saved $50) just using TextEdit (Apple's free text/rtf editor) anyway.

The feature of TextWrangler I like the most is "Optional Emacs keybinding support". Heh. If you want Emacs keybinding, I think I can find something that'll do that in an even more Emacs-like fashion.

If you need a powerful text editor that's Mac friendly, shell out for BBEdit. I just can't see there being much middle ground. But again, from BareBones point of view, they're out next to nothing and get to have all the coverage of a "brand new text editor".

FWIW, the current version of Emacs can be compiled as a native Carbon application. Full mouse support, no terminal or X11 required. Check out http://members.shaw.ca/akochoi-emacs/

But I didn't buy a $3k titanium laptop so I could run an un-mouseable text editor in a terminal window (nor did I buy it so that I could install X and xemacs, so that's not a solution).

I contacted the technical support departments for Telus(ADSL) and Shaw(cable) with regards to their support for IPv6. Telus and Shaw are the two major broadband providers in the province of British Columbia, Canada.

Here are the results:

- Telus: Technical support rep. actually knew what IPv6 was and said that I was the first person to ever ask him that question. His response (after talking to supervisors) was: "Telus will deploy IPv6 within two years".

- Shaw: Technical support rep. did not know what I was talking about, escalated me to second level support, who then put me on hold for a while. Their response: not supported and there is no schedule to deploy IPv6. He said that Shaw "would do it when we start running out of IPs".

I didn't bother to contact any small ISPs in town.

This may sound inflammatory, but it's just cold facts...

The code in http://members.shaw.ca/rosensto/bus/bus.pl is horrible. Just look at it. No strict, no warnings, global variables everywhere, executing `external programs` when the same thing could be achieved easily and cleanly using Perl.

localtime didn't work? Sounds like PEBKAC.

Does he say "Cannot load $stop_num"."left.html" because "$stop_numleft.html" didn't work? D'oh. How about using e.g. "${stop_num}left.html"?

Is he joking? It wasn't funny. Why not just use LWP?

I find it very interesting that this guy accually created this thing. And, I Never knew that phone cables had four minicables. What I want to know is 1:Why did he create this thing as an attachment for LCDproc . Why not standalone? (unless he didn't know how too, In wich case I understand). and 2: Why only for Linux/BSD? Oh yeah. LCDproc only works on Linux and BSD. But why not write a windows version? But why not write a windows version? Anyways, good job to him.

should be:

http://members.shaw.ca/rosensto/bus/bus.pl

I track the cvs commits. rc6 came out 2 or 3 weeks ago, so look at the bug fixes in the last 2 or 3 issues.

Is there anyone here that really uses a rootless X server and Xemacs for work every day? I tried that solution myself (desperate for a real integrated native Emacs that windowed well), and there were enough annoying problems that I abandoned that approach really quickly... come to think of it, I think the Aqua port of XEmacs and XEmacs running under a rootless X-Server shared the same problem with shell stuff invoked from within emacs dropping results (like 'M-x grep a *' in a large directory full of text returning three results).

Anyway, I did want to mention for those scared off that GNU Emacs now compiles well under OS X, I've been using that and it is very stable. The only issue is that cut and/or paste does not work from/to Emacs and other OS X apps (I forget the direction that's broken).

Here's a fast mirror incase the website goes down.

Wireless Cable
Image Wireless

Telco Delivered TV/Internet (not VoD, though)
SaskTel Max

Regular Cable TV/Internet
Shaw Cablesystems

Satellite TV
StarChoice
ExpressVu

Here's a way to hear it even if you can't see it.

They're doing it in my neck of the woods already.

Not a non-IE friendly site, though :|

Speaking of Emacs, The OS X 10.2 Terminal as a option to use the option key to the Meta key. This is the first time I've been able to use Emacs with a real Meta key and it rocks.

1. Precompiled EMACS 21.1 on Aqua
2. Compile it yourself off the CVS tree.

pretty close, if you were in Canada http://www.shaw.ca/litespeed/ A cable connection rated at "5x faster then dialup" at $30/month CAD. I would think that, assuming you are in the states, there should be someone in your vastly larger market offering cheaper (capped) services.

I grew up on Douglas Adams' work, and my series GOLDEN CITY is based on it! I should complete the script! Read GOLDEN CITY at my site.

No need to wait and have someone build it for you, if you are comfortable with Terminal.app. Directions on how to do it are HERE. In case you don't know what EMACS is, it's the great-grand-daddy text editor for programmers and propellerheads. It does everything but your laundry and makes BBedit/Pepper/Jedit/etc. look wimpy in comparison...

Broadband is very cheap and reaonable here in Canada. Same price or cheaper, before exchange. First 6 months are $30 CDN with Shaw where I am, then $40 after that. That's somewhere around 7 cents USD. ;)

I regularly get 400k/sec download speeds.

Just to clarify, you forgot my trusty ol' Mac Plus (introduced Jan. 1986). That's the model without an internal HD, but it did come with a SCSI (DB-25) port. The SE (basically same form factor as the Plus) came on the market March 1987, and during its lifetime there was the option for an internal HD. (Dates courtesy of Mactracker)

Personally, I prefer the Photo Radar to traditional radar because you can see it coming and slow down before you pass the camera. Also, common locations and dectecting vehicles are well known. Though this may reduce its effectiveness, it beats conventional methods that cost demerits on your licence (photo radar tickets carry no demerits since legally, the fine is attributed to the offending vehicle and not the driver since the system cannot prove who was driving the vehicle). My greatest concern with photo radar is calibration of equipment. I find it hard to believe that the operators go through the necessary procedure for aligning and adjusting the equipment and instead rely on a ~13km/h uncertainty in measurement for compensation.

As for the red light cameras, they really aren't an issue for most alert drivers. Their locations are well known and visible. Some are even brightly painted by school kids and are totally obvious. They also seem to be set to catch only the real red light offenders (as opposed to those chancing the ambers). That is of course when they are functioning properly.

Personally, I prefer the Photo Radar to traditional radar because you can see it coming and slow down before you pass the camera. Also, common locations and dectecting vehicles are well known. Though this may reduce its effectiveness, it beats conventional methods that cost demerits on your licence (photo radar tickets carry no demerits since legally, the fine is attributed to the offending vehicle and not the driver since the system cannot prove who was driving the vehicle). My greatest concern with photo radar is calibration of equipment. I find it hard to believe that the operators go through the necessary procedure for aligning and adjusting the equipment and instead rely on a ~13km/h uncertainty in measurement for compensation.

As for the red light cameras, they really aren't an issue for most alert drivers. Their locations are well known and visible. Some are even brightly painted by school kids and are totally obvious. They also seem to be set to catch only the real red light offenders (as opposed to those chancing the ambers). That is of course when they are functioning properly.

Arguing on the Internet.

My cable provider, Shaw starting building thier own netowrk at least a year before @Home ran into trouble. Thier transition was a lot simpler for people, they already had moved many of thier customers when the Chapter 11 was filed.

While I don't doubt that greed played a part in thier move, I think they were mostly embarassed. I can recall a 6 month period when you couldn't pay Everquest from 9:30pm till 1:00 am, one of @Home's router on the west cost crapped out on schedule, Every Night. Other network outages and strange behaviour were common, news servers were useless and email just vanished on a regular basis. If you tried to send someone in the Calgary tech community an email and they didn't recive it for 2 days, or it just disapeared nobody was surprised. I was on the phone with a recruiter one day who should have recived my resume a couple days previously, she was wondering where it was. All I had to say was @Home, she just said, "Oh yeah, that happens all the time, do you have Hotmail?"

I don't think it was any wonder at all that Shaw decided not to renew.

Yes, this message was written over broadband. I didn't ever say the Aussie broadband situation wasn't bad. I have great respect for the country's history as well, so don't take it personally mmmkay? Now, let me put it to you this way. Telstra is an Australian-based company, if I'm not mistaken, and a very successful one at that. It is traded on the Australian stock exchange. That means that some people in your country, though perhaps not yourself or the original slashdot poster, actually support this company. This is called dollar voting. A company can't succeed unless people actually buy its products. While you support a company, no matter if you like it, your complaints are meaningless. Action speaks louder than words.

Now let me tell you how it is here. In this Canadian city, we have one real telephone company, Telus. We also have one cable company, Shaw. This is by no means a tiny city either, though not huge. Shaw provides cable-based broadband service. When they first provided it about 5 years ago, their service was horrible. We had outages for weeks sometimes, DNS problems, poor tech support (they specifically told many non-Windows users that in spite of the problem being their fault they wouldn't correct it because the people weren't using Windows). It was pure bullshit. They have improved some in that time but man did they ever suck and they were about the only option until cheap home DSL arrived. Initially it was only 3 real companies who provided it. CADvision, Nucleus, and Telus. Telus still to this day has bandwidth limits and poor tech support. Being the only telephone company around they have an attitude of not caring about the concerns of customers because they assume those customers have no choice, which is mostly true. CADvision was a decent provider, heck before I had cable all I did was connect via 14.4 modem through them. Then it was eaten by PSInet and went downhill. Now, it's been eaten by Telus. Yep, phone company now owns two of the largest ISPs in the city. Nucleus is still around and isn't half bad.

But you know all that took 5 years to really happen here and I don't ask you to pity me because that'd be the pussy thing to do. If I want change, I'll bloody well get out there and make it happen but you know what? I don't give a shit. I made my point in the parent post and there are much more pressing things in the world to worry about than whether or not you can apt-get update your debian packages or play Quake 3 Arena with decent latency.

- ACPlus

see here:
>On the contrary, many folks have had exceptional service with DSL. --emphasis mine.

Now see here:
> I have had BellSouth's
> my IP
>There has been exactly one outage...after I got the service...which I used the freely-provided
>Most of my friends...have cable modems, and not a day goes by...complain about their connection going down
>It seems to me that cable modem technology ... are much more questionable than DSL.

Well it seems to me that you are using alot of I's, Me's, and My's in your "factual" account on "many folks' DSL service". And the rest is the opinion of your friends. Let me give you my *experience* as a seasoned helldesk tech at more than 3 companies that offered DSL and/or cable.

Invariably, customers of DSL broadband technology suffer more inconvenience/disatisfaction caused by faulty DSLAMS, line attentuation, network outages, software incompatibilities (PPPoE), and red tape from the Telco, than their cable modem counterparts.

Add to this the fact that average downstream and upstream speeds for cable users are usually twice as fast as DSL, waitlists are virtually non-existant, and availability is generally subject to whether or not you can get cable TV. If you can get TV, you can probably get broadband. Oh, and for the same price if not cheaper.

Vancouver

Shaw Cable (TV company): $39.95/month CDN, 2 dynamic IPs, no traffic limit, first month free(30-day trial). Average dl 80 KILOBYTES/s, ul 40 KILOBYTES, distance is irrelevent, usually installed within 5 days.

Telus (phone company): $39.95/month CDN, 2 dynamic IPs, 5GB down 1 GB up (residential! pfft!), 2 months free if you buy the modem (translation:you just paid 2 months), avg dl 40KILOBYTES/s ul 10KILOBYTES/s, speeds are dependant on distance from the CO, and affect availibility, eligibility affected by line integrity (for those of you in older buildings--you're screwed), waitlists are usually about 6 months.

Both companies offer outlandish "corporate" and SOHO accounts, but the links are there, make up your own mind.

I have to second this motion. Shaw Cablesystems, based in Calgary, Alberta, Canada, provides first-rate services to their customers, from coast to coast.

After Shaw moved into my city (replacing the @home infrastructure rogers was using with their own), my average speeds jumped from 39 KBps to around 120 KBps, with bursts to 600 KBps.

There are no rate limits. There are no transfer limits. The first-level technician I talked to knew what a firewall was and could give me a few names of good ones - but knew that Macs are pretty much screwed in that department. He suggested I go to tucows though. In short, he knew what he was talking about (more than most level 1 techs).

People who are saying 'broadband isn't feasible' really mean 'broadband companies who think it's a good idea to buy online greeting card companies that make no profit for $780 million USD and then sell them for $24 million USD'.

Excite was stuck in the 'portal' days. They didn't realize that 'profit margins' were more important than 'eyes' (i.e. ad revenue and portals channeling people into services). Sadly, this was blatant stupidity, since the portal days were over three years ago, even before the tech boom.

Oh well. I can still stream MP3s and file-share, so I'm happy. I can still get 390 kbps from my webserver and DCC to friends at 52 kbps, so I can't complain.

--Dan

Absolutely NO one has made mention of this, but the one company that has been exempt from discontinuation of service from the Judge's ruling is Shaw Cablesystems serving western Canada. All @Home services still being used by Shaw (Content, Mail, Webspace and News) have never stopped working for this transition period. DHCP/DNS/Proxies/Provisioning is all done in-house. Gives customers more time to switch to the new services.

// marc

Absolutely NO one has made mention of this, but the one company that has been exempt from discontinuation of service from the Judge's ruling is Shaw Cablesystems serving western Canada. All @Home services still being used by Shaw (Content, Mail, Webspace and News) have never stopped working for this transition period. DHCP/DNS/Proxies/Provisioning is all done in-house. Gives customers more time to switch to the new services.

// marc

Excite @Home is the corporation that supports @home.com e-mail. It is operating in bankruptcy and it is unknown how long it will continue to support the @home.com e-mail. Over the last year Shaw has been building its own Data Centre to support e-mail, provisioning web space, etc. and given, the circumstances with Excite @Home, we are accelerating the migration of our customers over to our Shaw infrastructure which includes transitioning email addresses to @shaw.ca. We are asking our customers to complete an Email Quickstep process and then begin using their new @shaw.ca email address to ensure that impact is minimized in the event that the Excite@Home corporation is unable to continue supporting their @home email service.

Companies are getting tired of @home here in the great white north as well. Shaw, who covers ALL of western Canada (from Vancouver to Thunder Bay, Ontario) are dropping @home when their contract runs up fall of next year.

I'm a TSR for Shaw and I can tell you that there are a few really good reasons for this. The major problem is the mail servers. Every year in my town, university students migrate here from rural areas and all of them want shaw@home. The mail servers go down enough during the summer, but come fall they just seize up and die. Almost every single day they go down and it reflects really poorly on us as a company.

To deal with this (among many other) problems, we've created our own IDC, and are slowly switching everything over to use it. We've already got our installers setting people up with the new @shaw.ca email addresses, and have all our customer's @home.com emails reserved for them at shaw.ca.

I never had shaw@home before I started working for shaw, but I am very impressed with it as a user. My download speeds are consistently around 300-500kb/s and the only outages that I've had are planned outages I've gotten emails about a week in advance. I know not everbody's experience has been the same, but I can say with confidence that we do do our very best here in Saskatchewan when things do break down. All the geeks here in TSR-land love their jobs, and do our best every time. I'm sure anybody from Saskatchewan who has dealt with us can tell you the same. :)

Oh, and about how too many people in a node can slow you down, that's just not true in Saskatchewan. Our head-end tech just throws more hardware at it if a node slows down past where 'he' thinks its acceptable.

Sorry for proselytizing, but I'm just impressed. And I'm NOT getting paid for writing this (although I am writing this between calls!).

Companies are getting tired of @home here in the great white north as well. Shaw, who covers ALL of western Canada (from Vancouver to Thunder Bay, Ontario) are dropping @home when their contract runs up fall of next year.

I'm a TSR for Shaw and I can tell you that there are a few really good reasons for this. The major problem is the mail servers. Every year in my town, university students migrate here from rural areas and all of them want shaw@home. The mail servers go down enough during the summer, but come fall they just seize up and die. Almost every single day they go down and it reflects really poorly on us as a company.

To deal with this (among many other) problems, we've created our own IDC, and are slowly switching everything over to use it. We've already got our installers setting people up with the new @shaw.ca email addresses, and have all our customer's @home.com emails reserved for them at shaw.ca.

I never had shaw@home before I started working for shaw, but I am very impressed with it as a user. My download speeds are consistently around 300-500kb/s and the only outages that I've had are planned outages I've gotten emails about a week in advance. I know not everbody's experience has been the same, but I can say with confidence that we do do our very best here in Saskatchewan when things do break down. All the geeks here in TSR-land love their jobs, and do our best every time. I'm sure anybody from Saskatchewan who has dealt with us can tell you the same. :)

Oh, and about how too many people in a node can slow you down, that's just not true in Saskatchewan. Our head-end tech just throws more hardware at it if a node slows down past where 'he' thinks its acceptable.

Sorry for proselytizing, but I'm just impressed. And I'm NOT getting paid for writing this (although I am writing this between calls!).

So I don't really get the beef people have with them. Of course Canada doesn't have any DMCA but I am sure if you give Jean some time he'll come up with legislation that will make the DMCA look like a walk in park.

I mean we can't see english signs in quebec, french in Sault Ste Marie, so why should we have the freedom of using the net freely? You sure @home isn't run by Canadians?