After several days of trying fruitlessly to contact tech support about my unreachable hosts problem, things came to an unexciting conclusion this morning, when some change on AT&T's part fixed the problem. No problems contacting any host I've tried, though I think I'll give it a while before I try to use AT&T's nameservers.
I'm less than pleased with the runaround I got from their support hotlines -- all told I spent over three hours on the phone over several days and never once got to speak with anyone competent to help with my problem. However, I've worked in networking before and am willing to cut AT&T some slack on the support side and some credit for a speedy and fairly smooth transition. They restored service to me and tens (hundreds?) of thousands of other users after only a few days and that's worth keeping in mind..
I saw Hamlet (Olivier and Gibson) after reading the original back in ENG 1B. That helped for perspective, but it was vital that they be shown after.
At the risk of straying phenomenally far from the original topic, I guess I really don't understant that attitude. After all, I doubt you'd ever say something like "I heard Beethoven's Ninth Symphony after reading the score in music composition, etc.."
My point being this: Hamlet was written as a play. As a work of art it was presumably meant by its creator to be seen and heard, not just read. The text of the play was never meant to be experienced directly by the audience any more than the code of a program is meant to be experienced by the user or the blueprint of a building is meant to be experienced by a visitor.
The text is an important resource for close study but it's exactly backwards to argue that the text is the intended expression of the work and its production as a play is an embellishment useful mostly for those who have studied the work and want another perspective.
Teacher: Today kids, we are going to start the month-long process of reading Hamlet...
Student: Couldn't we just watch the movie in two hours instead?
Teacher: No!
Damn right, indeed! What kind of teacher would allow one of the immortal plays of Shakespeare to be cheapened into some sort of dramatic presentation, cheating students out of the chance to experience for themselves the brilliance of the Bard's written stage directions?
Yes, I can fix the title bar crap, but with this (and other Windows installers which assume that practically any key in your registry is fair game) it's the key changes that aren't visible which worry me most.
I install very little on the Windows side of my machine, but it occurs to me that a registry diff program would be ideal for dealing with the aftereffects of over-enthusiastic installers, as much as it pains me to see the burden of vigilance shifted onto the user. Can anyone recommend a good free-software registry diff utility?
Called the tech-support number back during their business hours, where I was connected to a service droid. Uninterested in her offer to explain to me the attractions of an AT&T platinum plus premium channel package, I took the initiative and interrupted with "I'm calling because I'm having trouble with the transition from @Home service to the AT&T replacement."
From the other end of the phone, I heard a sigh and a pause as she took a deep breath and launched into a lengthy statement which, judging from her monotone delivery, must already have been delivered at least 100 times. Because of her listless delivery I couldn't quite catch the whole thing but the bits and pieces that made it through were clear enough: "..circumstances beyond our control....sincerely regret any inconvenience....will be working hard in the weeks ahead.. etc.." Unsettled by the mention of "the weeks ahead" and unwilling to cede the advantage of momentum, I interrupted again. "But wait! I received a phone call saying service had been restored in my area."
Apparently this was a new and wholly unexpected situation, one for which she was clearly caught off guard. "Oh.. ummm.. hmmm.. Please hold while I forward you to Customer Retention." < click >
Dang! I must admit, I should've seen that one coming. Anyway, I got placed in another hold queue, from which I never escaped. I have no idea what they're retaining in that department, but I seriously doubt it's customers. I was forced to concede defeat an hour later when my cell phone (no land line seemed like such a good idea once upon a time) started giving me the low-battery beep but I knew I was doomed from the moment I was put into the second hold queue.
More updates as the saga develops.. Still having host unreachable problems with roughly 2/3 of the hosts I try to ping..
Heh.. In the two minutes it took me to read the article and post, about thirty other people responded first with comments bashing the idea of video clips being a sane application for this technology. I guess I'm not the only one!
Sounds like a fantastic start, but I want to know more. In my opinion, speed is only one of the major variables in the wireless networking equation. It balances against cost, coverage, and openness. A high speed, reasonable cost, general purpose network with nationwide coverage would be a dream come true. A high speed, high cost, proprietary network that only works in major cities doesn't interest me much.
As an aside, though, am I the only one who wonders about the weird fixation cellular network planners seem to have with video clips? Honestly, if you asked me the top 25 things I'd want to do with a high-bandwidth portable personal communications device it wouldn't even occur to me to put "watch video clips" on my list. Am I the one who's out of touch here, or are they?
I was an Excite@Home broadband subscriber in Washington state until around 6:00 AM local time on Saturday. (I was using the service at the time it cut out..) On Sunday morning I received an automated phone message from the local cable provider, AT&T, saying they were taking steps to provide a transition to their own service as quickly as possible. Sunday afternoon I received a second call claiming that they had re-established service in my area.
The claim turned out to be semi-true. The first hurdle turned out to be DNS. The nameservers specified by their DHCP servers have been totally bogus. The first two in the list of three are unpingable and the third replies to every request with a lookup failure / unknown host. So I pointed my systems towards an open, known-good nameserver run by one of my former sysadmin colleagues. Now I've got correct nameservice but it turns out that about two out of three addresses I try are unpingable for reasons that are completely opaque to me. Example: I can ping two hosts (call them A & B) across the country, both sitting on the same subnet. Host A answers, host B is unreachable. Traceroute to host B (from my machine) travels all the way to the gateway that's the last hop before either host, but packets going one hop further to host B don't seem to make the round trip while packets to host A do. (I have, of course, verified through a third host that host B is actually up and reachable, just not reachable from my home.)
Called the provided AT&T tech-support number on Sunday afternoon hoping to find a quick fix (or at least make them aware there was a problem..) The recorded phone message said they don't provide phone support after 8 pm or on Sunday (arggh!) but would be answering calls again at 8 am Monday. Suspecting that I'd have to deal with a bottom-level tech-support script drone trained to reject any request from someone (a) running an "unsupported configuration", and/or (b) refusing to run AT&T's little "Click OK and we'll do a bunch of stuff to your computer's configuration and then we'll all be happy" Windows Configurator utility, which their message insisted I download and run to fix all my problems, I unplugged my lovable little Linksys box, connected the PC directly to the cable modem, rebooted into Windows and ran their damn configurator. It's not like I actually expected it to fix anything, but the only effects I could observe were about 90 seconds (!) of hard-drive activity, a mandatory Windows reboot, and the fact that now all MSIE browser windows say "Microsoft Internet Explorer provided by AT&T Broadband Internet" in the title bar. God only knows what other crap they dumped into my registry, but I was planning a re-install this week anyway. Still, it's not an encouraging sign when a company feels it's on solid customer-relations ground putting an advertisement in every window titlebar. (Besides, what's the freaking point? Am I supposed to buy more Internet connectivity? I'm already paying for their service, what more do they want?)
Anyway, that's a summary of my experience with the transition so far. I'll post a follow-up after things settle out if anyone expresses interest.
the only real differences are that it only has a 2MB buffer and it uses USB instead of Firewire
It's been said before, but apparently it needs to be said again: when it comes to portable personal electronics devices, SIZE MATTERS!
I've never used either the Archos product or the iPod but I have worked in the handheld industry and can tell you that a portable device that's half the size of another is, at least from a user experience perspective, simply not the same kind of device. The Archos/Nomad products and the iPod have many features in common and are intended to perform similar functions but the small size and extended battery life of the iPod absolutely qualify as "real differences".
If you don't see the difference, consider the laptop market, where products are also segregated by size and portability. A super-slim, super-thin, extremely lightweight laptop commands a big price premium over a more powerful full-featured model. Or consider the history of the handheld industry. What made the first Palm Pilots a success when the Apple Newton had failed only a year or so before? Size and battery life were a huge part of that..
It's perfectly legitimate to question whether the iPod is worth the price or whether you'd rather have another product. It's a matter of personal preference whether its advantages over other devices outweigh its disadvantages. But it's foolish to pretend that those differences don't exist or are restricted to "only... a 2MB buffer and... USB instead of Firewire."
The original poster, writing about IBM's decision not to provide official tech support for *BSD, writes: "Is it my imagination or does this seem strange for a company that seems to understand the Open Source idea? "
What part of "the Open Source idea" mandates that IBM commit resources to provide free technical support to ensure their laptop works with every open-source operating system?
Isn't the whole supposed advantage of open-source that when companies decide not to provide a feature or offer support for something that individual users are empowered (by possession of the source) to make it work if they really want to?
If IBM had deliberately designed the system to be incompatible, or if they refused to release technical details necessary to port to their machine, that would be one thing. But why should it be incumbent upon them to ensure that their designs are compatible with all of the open-source operating systems their users might want to use regardless of whether the pool of potential customers seeking such compatibility is big enough to purchase enough machines to offset the costs of compatibility testing and providing support?
So again: just what part of "the Open Source" idea *is* it that makes you think IBM owes you a free lunch?
Perhaps Apple management thinks it's eliminating credits but I somehow suspect they'll only be driven underground by this policy decision. At any rate it seems like a petty step to take at this point in time and I don't understand the reasoning behind it at all..
Regardless, let's all observe a moment of silence in honor of "Fred Burst -- the only man whose name is a complete sentence," and other classic Apple credits.
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Final (and very unexciting) update:
After several days of trying fruitlessly to contact tech support about my unreachable hosts problem, things came to an unexciting conclusion this morning, when some change on AT&T's part fixed the problem. No problems contacting any host I've tried, though I think I'll give it a while before I try to use AT&T's nameservers.
I'm less than pleased with the runaround I got from their support hotlines -- all told I spent over three hours on the phone over several days and never once got to speak with anyone competent to help with my problem. However, I've worked in networking before and am willing to cut AT&T some slack on the support side and some credit for a speedy and fairly smooth transition. They restored service to me and tens (hundreds?) of thousands of other users after only a few days and that's worth keeping in mind..
At the risk of straying phenomenally far from the original topic, I guess I really don't understant that attitude. After all, I doubt you'd ever say something like "I heard Beethoven's Ninth Symphony after reading the score in music composition, etc.."
My point being this: Hamlet was written as a play. As a work of art it was presumably meant by its creator to be seen and heard, not just read. The text of the play was never meant to be experienced directly by the audience any more than the code of a program is meant to be experienced by the user or the blueprint of a building is meant to be experienced by a visitor.
The text is an important resource for close study but it's exactly backwards to argue that the text is the intended expression of the work and its production as a play is an embellishment useful mostly for those who have studied the work and want another perspective.
Damn right, indeed! What kind of teacher would allow one of the immortal plays of Shakespeare to be cheapened into some sort of dramatic presentation, cheating students out of the chance to experience for themselves the brilliance of the Bard's written stage directions?
Well, OK, bad example.. Exuent, stage left.
Yes, I can fix the title bar crap, but with this (and other Windows installers which assume that practically any key in your registry is fair game) it's the key changes that aren't visible which worry me most.
I install very little on the Windows side of my machine, but it occurs to me that a registry diff program would be ideal for dealing with the aftereffects of over-enthusiastic installers, as much as it pains me to see the burden of vigilance shifted onto the user. Can anyone recommend a good free-software registry diff utility?
Called the tech-support number back during their business hours, where I was connected to a service droid. Uninterested in her offer to explain to me the attractions of an AT&T platinum plus premium channel package, I took the initiative and interrupted with "I'm calling because I'm having trouble with the transition from @Home service to the AT&T replacement."
..sincerely regret any inconvenience.. ..will be working hard in the weeks ahead.. etc.." Unsettled by the mention of "the weeks ahead" and unwilling to cede the advantage of momentum, I interrupted again. "But wait! I received a phone call saying service had been restored in my area."
From the other end of the phone, I heard a sigh and a pause as she took a deep breath and launched into a lengthy statement which, judging from her monotone delivery, must already have been delivered at least 100 times. Because of her listless delivery I couldn't quite catch the whole thing but the bits and pieces that made it through were clear enough: "..circumstances beyond our control..
Apparently this was a new and wholly unexpected situation, one for which she was clearly caught off guard. "Oh.. ummm.. hmmm.. Please hold while I forward you to Customer Retention." < click >
Dang! I must admit, I should've seen that one coming. Anyway, I got placed in another hold queue, from which I never escaped. I have no idea what they're retaining in that department, but I seriously doubt it's customers. I was forced to concede defeat an hour later when my cell phone (no land line seemed like such a good idea once upon a time) started giving me the low-battery beep but I knew I was doomed from the moment I was put into the second hold queue.
More updates as the saga develops.. Still having host unreachable problems with roughly 2/3 of the hosts I try to ping..
Heh.. In the two minutes it took me to read the article and post, about thirty other people responded first with comments bashing the idea of video clips being a sane application for this technology. I guess I'm not the only one!
Sounds like a fantastic start, but I want to know more. In my opinion, speed is only one of the major variables in the wireless networking equation. It balances against cost, coverage, and openness. A high speed, reasonable cost, general purpose network with nationwide coverage would be a dream come true. A high speed, high cost, proprietary network that only works in major cities doesn't interest me much.
As an aside, though, am I the only one who wonders about the weird fixation cellular network planners seem to have with video clips? Honestly, if you asked me the top 25 things I'd want to do with a high-bandwidth portable personal communications device it wouldn't even occur to me to put "watch video clips" on my list. Am I the one who's out of touch here, or are they?
I was an Excite@Home broadband subscriber in Washington state until around 6:00 AM local time on Saturday. (I was using the service at the time it cut out..) On Sunday morning I received an automated phone message from the local cable provider, AT&T, saying they were taking steps to provide a transition to their own service as quickly as possible. Sunday afternoon I received a second call claiming that they had re-established service in my area.
The claim turned out to be semi-true. The first hurdle turned out to be DNS. The nameservers specified by their DHCP servers have been totally bogus. The first two in the list of three are unpingable and the third replies to every request with a lookup failure / unknown host. So I pointed my systems towards an open, known-good nameserver run by one of my former sysadmin colleagues. Now I've got correct nameservice but it turns out that about two out of three addresses I try are unpingable for reasons that are completely opaque to me. Example: I can ping two hosts (call them A & B) across the country, both sitting on the same subnet. Host A answers, host B is unreachable. Traceroute to host B (from my machine) travels all the way to the gateway that's the last hop before either host, but packets going one hop further to host B don't seem to make the round trip while packets to host A do. (I have, of course, verified through a third host that host B is actually up and reachable, just not reachable from my home.)
Called the provided AT&T tech-support number on Sunday afternoon hoping to find a quick fix (or at least make them aware there was a problem..) The recorded phone message said they don't provide phone support after 8 pm or on Sunday (arggh!) but would be answering calls again at 8 am Monday. Suspecting that I'd have to deal with a bottom-level tech-support script drone trained to reject any request from someone (a) running an "unsupported configuration", and/or (b) refusing to run AT&T's little "Click OK and we'll do a bunch of stuff to your computer's configuration and then we'll all be happy" Windows Configurator utility, which their message insisted I download and run to fix all my problems, I unplugged my lovable little Linksys box, connected the PC directly to the cable modem, rebooted into Windows and ran their damn configurator. It's not like I actually expected it to fix anything, but the only effects I could observe were about 90 seconds (!) of hard-drive activity, a mandatory Windows reboot, and the fact that now all MSIE browser windows say "Microsoft Internet Explorer provided by AT&T Broadband Internet" in the title bar. God only knows what other crap they dumped into my registry, but I was planning a re-install this week anyway. Still, it's not an encouraging sign when a company feels it's on solid customer-relations ground putting an advertisement in every window titlebar. (Besides, what's the freaking point? Am I supposed to buy more Internet connectivity? I'm already paying for their service, what more do they want?)
Anyway, that's a summary of my experience with the transition so far. I'll post a follow-up after things settle out if anyone expresses interest.
It's been said before, but apparently it needs to be said again: when it comes to portable personal electronics devices, SIZE MATTERS!
I've never used either the Archos product or the iPod but I have worked in the handheld industry and can tell you that a portable device that's half the size of another is, at least from a user experience perspective, simply not the same kind of device. The Archos/Nomad products and the iPod have many features in common and are intended to perform similar functions but the small size and extended battery life of the iPod absolutely qualify as "real differences".
If you don't see the difference, consider the laptop market, where products are also segregated by size and portability. A super-slim, super-thin, extremely lightweight laptop commands a big price premium over a more powerful full-featured model. Or consider the history of the handheld industry. What made the first Palm Pilots a success when the Apple Newton had failed only a year or so before? Size and battery life were a huge part of that..
It's perfectly legitimate to question whether the iPod is worth the price or whether you'd rather have another product. It's a matter of personal preference whether its advantages over other devices outweigh its disadvantages. But it's foolish to pretend that those differences don't exist or are restricted to "only
What part of "the Open Source idea" mandates that IBM commit resources to provide free technical support to ensure their laptop works with every open-source operating system?
Isn't the whole supposed advantage of open-source that when companies decide not to provide a feature or offer support for something that individual users are empowered (by possession of the source) to make it work if they really want to?
If IBM had deliberately designed the system to be incompatible, or if they refused to release technical details necessary to port to their machine, that would be one thing. But why should it be incumbent upon them to ensure that their designs are compatible with all of the open-source operating systems their users might want to use regardless of whether the pool of potential customers seeking such compatibility is big enough to purchase enough machines to offset the costs of compatibility testing and providing support?
So again: just what part of "the Open Source" idea *is* it that makes you think IBM owes you a free lunch?
Regardless, let's all observe a moment of silence in honor of "Fred Burst -- the only man whose name is a complete sentence," and other classic Apple credits.