I started up my ADSL last August when it first became available in the St. Louis area. I've been incredibly happy with the download speeds etc. Uploads are, of course, slower thanks the the A in my ADSL but I'm not running a high volume web server or anything so who cares.
Anyway, my telco is Southwestern Bell, but my ISP is First Class Solutions (http://www.firstclasssolutions.com). As a result, I'm not putting up with any of the crap that goes along with the standard SBC setup. I've got a static IP, 1.5MB down stream, no compatability problems with linux.
I'm using an alcatel ADSL modem that connects straight to the wall and straight into eth0 of my linux box. eth1 connects to my hub and masqs my LAN out to the internet. I've had a total of about 20 hours downtime in the past year.
Here's the only bad part of the story. If you move, it can take them for-freaking-ever to get the service setup again. I'm moving in with my fiancee just upstairs from my old apartment. It's taken them two months to get the service moved to the new apartment, and I'm doing the home installation MYSELF!! It's taken them two months to just map out a circuit and flip a few switches. So, there's my biggest complaint... in the meantime, dialup sucks.
Quick question: Anyone know of a good website that explains how DSL works on the telco side. I'm just curious to learn why it took SBC so darned long!!
What's even more fun is when you add the mbr of the second drive to your NT loader list, too.
Then you can boot and LILO comes up. Select 'NT' and the NT loader comes up. Select 'Linux' and LILO comes up. back and forth all day long if you like...
Sense the site seems to have been/.ed, I grabbed what I could and put up a mirror of one of the images. I've got a measly ADSL connection, so it'll soon be saturated, too, but enjoy the picture I was able to get...
That's all well and good except for on thing: When you're enumerating points in a list of arguments such as you've done in this post, you should use "first," "second," "third," etc to order them.
"Firstly," like many other "ly" words is an adverb. Therefore it must modify a verb or adjective. In the enumeration of points, you are modifying the points themselves. That is, this is the "first" point. This is the "second" point. And so forth.
Just thought I'd help keep our English skills up to snuff, so people can't say computer geeks don't write good.;)
I just discovered Conglomerate on freshmeat while searching for something else. I haven't tried out the tool yet, but it creates XML, is GUI, and claims to provide change tracking and version merging facilities. We'll see...
** A side question: Does anyone's company use (or has anyone seen) an in-house manual of style for vague areas of technical documentation (a Chicago Manual of Style for technology). That includes, for instance, context sensitive definitions of data warehouse, ecommerce, business intelligence, etc. All of those great business-savvy catch phrases and buzz words.
Anyone have any suggested references or starting points? **
Since I'll probably not spend much time working on this myself (don't want to get fired from my real job that pays the bills), I'll throw out my first thoughts about the cryp.
Perhaps the most obvious observation is that there are really four different sets of characters in the message: right-side-up UPPER CASE right-side-up lower case up-side-down UPPER CASE up-side-down lower case
If the message isn't obsenely difficult to decode (as with the first message) then there are probably simply four different sets of rules to use with each of the four character types.
A starting place might be to begin with shorter words or common repetitions of characters and begin there.
Simple character replacement isn't all that difficult to decode, but character replacement when you've got 4 times as many encodings could be much more difficult. For instance, the upside "R" and "q" and rightside up "l" and "B" could all be the same letter for instance, making it nearly impossible to identify patterns or repeting characters. Someone want to make some estimates as to the total number of possible encodings?
It seems important to consider what the government counts as "hours spent working." I wonder what measure the government uses in comparison to what most people count.
Let's have a new survey. When you say "I work X hrs each week", what do you count?
[ ] Only the hours you get paid for. [ ] Only the hours you spend in an office / home office. [ ] Only the hours you actually do business related tasks. [ ] All the time you spend thinking about work. [ ] Include all the you spend enhancing skills that relate to your work. [ ] Other hours: ____________
In consulting firms, bonuses are often related to the percentage of hours you bill to a client during the year. Wouldn't it be nice if I could count all of the time I spend on my computer at home working on personal projects!? (Gaming makes me a stronger asset to the company!)
Increasing motherboard speed woult be nice, too. A 133 MHz system bus is nice, but wouldn't it be great if your 800 MHz processor could access RDRAM at 200MHz or higher.
Slashdot Mirror
I started up my ADSL last August when it first became available in the St. Louis area. I've been incredibly happy with the download speeds etc. Uploads are, of course, slower thanks the the A in my ADSL but I'm not running a high volume web server or anything so who cares.
Anyway, my telco is Southwestern Bell, but my ISP is First Class Solutions (http://www.firstclasssolutions.com). As a result, I'm not putting up with any of the crap that goes along with the standard SBC setup. I've got a static IP, 1.5MB down stream, no compatability problems with linux.
I'm using an alcatel ADSL modem that connects straight to the wall and straight into eth0 of my linux box. eth1 connects to my hub and masqs my LAN out to the internet. I've had a total of about 20 hours downtime in the past year.
Here's the only bad part of the story. If you move, it can take them for-freaking-ever to get the service setup again. I'm moving in with my fiancee just upstairs from my old apartment. It's taken them two months to get the service moved to the new apartment, and I'm doing the home installation MYSELF!! It's taken them two months to just map out a circuit and flip a few switches. So, there's my biggest complaint... in the meantime, dialup sucks.
Quick question: Anyone know of a good website that explains how DSL works on the telco side. I'm just curious to learn why it took SBC so darned long!!
I've been doing that for a while, too.
What's even more fun is when you add the mbr of the second drive to your NT loader list, too.
Then you can boot and LILO comes up.
Select 'NT' and the NT loader comes up.
Select 'Linux' and LILO comes up.
back and forth all day long if you like...
;-)
www.apo49.org/area51/area.jpg
That's all well and good except for on thing: When you're enumerating points in a list of arguments such as you've done in this post, you should use "first," "second," "third," etc to order them.
;)
"Firstly," like many other "ly" words is an adverb. Therefore it must modify a verb or adjective. In the enumeration of points, you are modifying the points themselves. That is, this is the "first" point. This is the "second" point. And so forth.
Just thought I'd help keep our English skills up to snuff, so people can't say computer geeks don't write good.
The URL: http://www.conglomerate.org
Anyone else used this tool yet?
** A side question: Does anyone's company use (or has anyone seen) an in-house manual of style for vague areas of technical documentation (a Chicago Manual of Style for technology). That includes, for instance, context sensitive definitions of data warehouse, ecommerce, business intelligence, etc. All of those great business-savvy catch phrases and buzz words.
Anyone have any suggested references or starting points? **
Since I'll probably not spend much time working on this myself (don't want to get fired from my real job that pays the bills), I'll throw out my first thoughts about the cryp.
Perhaps the most obvious observation is that there are really four different sets of characters in the message:
right-side-up UPPER CASE
right-side-up lower case
up-side-down UPPER CASE
up-side-down lower case
If the message isn't obsenely difficult to decode (as with the first message) then there are probably simply four different sets of rules to use with each of the four character types.
A starting place might be to begin with shorter words or common repetitions of characters and begin there.
Simple character replacement isn't all that difficult to decode, but character replacement when you've got 4 times as many encodings could be much more difficult. For instance, the upside "R" and "q" and rightside up "l" and "B" could all be the same letter for instance, making it nearly impossible to identify patterns or repeting characters. Someone want to make some estimates as to the total number of possible encodings?
Is it (26!)^4 or something crazy like that?
(26!)^4 = 2.65 x 10^106
It seems important to consider what the government counts as "hours spent working." I wonder what measure the government uses in comparison to what most people count.
Let's have a new survey. When you say "I work X hrs each week", what do you count?
[ ] Only the hours you get paid for.
[ ] Only the hours you spend in an office / home office.
[ ] Only the hours you actually do business related tasks.
[ ] All the time you spend thinking about work.
[ ] Include all the you spend enhancing skills that relate to your work.
[ ] Other hours: ____________
In consulting firms, bonuses are often related to the percentage of hours you bill to a client during the year. Wouldn't it be nice if I could count all of the time I spend on my computer at home working on personal projects!? (Gaming makes me a stronger asset to the company!)
Increasing motherboard speed woult be nice, too. A 133 MHz system bus is nice, but wouldn't it be great if your 800 MHz processor could access RDRAM at 200MHz or higher.
Cache... we don't need no stinking cache!
--"The it'd-be-cool-if department".