I've got quite a bit of experience using a TV-B-Gone in Wal-Mart stores, so let me fill you in on some details.
First, much to my disappointment, the TV-B-Gone doesn't work on whatever model of TV they have hanging from the ceiling blaring ads all day long. I've tried a bunch of times in different stores, both with the stock TV-B-Gone and with one of Ladyada's kits, using hacked firmware with more manufacturers' codes in it. No luck. I've also tried looking for a make/model on the TV's themselves, but have never managed to find one. The front of the TV's are covered with a cardboard or plastic cover, and the backs are next to impossible to see from the floor.
When you walk into many Wal-Mart stores, there'll be a small monitor hanging from the ceiling showing a feed from one of the security cameras. At least in this case, it turns out the cameras can't see the IR from the TV-B-Gone. The cameras are probably the variety that come with IR filters. Why they'd choose such models, I have no idea. I also have no idea whether any of the other cameras in the store see the IR or not, but the ones feeding the displays near the doors definitely don't.
Nobody from security has ever bothered me about using my TV-B-Gone. This isn't the Pentagon, it's freakin' Wal-Mart. The security people are probably making $7 an hour and really don't give a rat's ass if some jackass like me with a high-tech toy is walking around turning off TV's, especially considering I'm also a paying customer. I may be bored enough to turn off TV's for fun, but I'm not bored enough to actually drive to Wal-Mart just for that purpose.
Yes, it's fun to turn off the big-screen TV's while Bubba and his rode-hard-and-put-up-wet girlfriend are gawking at them, trying to figure out which one will fit through the door of their double-wide. But that's nowhere near as much fun as turning off the TV's in the video game section when Bubba's pudgy little 10-year-old son is in the middle of playing some Xbox game.
Wow, it's a good thing scathing sarcasm isn't a sin, 'cause you'd totally be going to H-E-double-hockey-sticks. I suppose it could be argued that it's a form of pride, but I'll leave that up to the religious scholars.
Yes, it's true, I'm resorting to making cheap jokes. But what else can one do when confronted with the kind of rigid belief system put forth by the Christian fundamentalists? I don't mean to accuse you, or anyone else here, of being one of them - I realize there are moderate Christians who sincerely believe in Jesus and attempt to follow His word. But this doesn't seem to be true of the religious right in general. Jesus preached love and unity; they preach fear and divisiveness. And no amount of logical reasoning will change their minds. So I resort instead to humor - the universal solvent of fear. Whether I actually succeed in being funny or not is largely a matter of personal taste, but hey, I amuse myself, and I figure at least a few others may share my sense of humor.
For lots of fun, answer "yes" to every single question a telemarketer asks. I think there's a video on YouTube of a guy doing this, but I tried it once, and it works. Wow, they sure get pissy after a while! At first it seems like the answer "yes" might make sense, but eventually they start asking for specific pieces of information, to which you keep replying, "yes!" I had to give up after a while because it was just too hard to suppress my laughter.
My call went something like this:
Telemarketer: "blah blah blah..." Me: "Yes" Telemarketer: "I'm looking for a specific number." Me: "Yes" Telemarketer: "OK, so what it it?" Me: "Yes" Telemarketer: "Sir, do you understand me? Do you understand the words coming out of my mouth!? I'm looking for a specific number!" Me: "Yes"
Hams are not limited to 9600 baud by any kind of regulation. That's about as fast as you'll get on UHF with a single FM narrowband channel, but some of those crazy bastards working microwave frequencies have achieved digital data rates much higher than 9600 baud.
I actually tried this with a wireless keyboard/mouse I have that has dismal range (5 feet or so - beyond that it's unreliable). I was actually quite surprised that it made no perceptible difference. Maybe what I did just wasn't enough, or caused some weird impedance mismatch or something. The frequency was low - 49 MHz - so I figured an extra couple of feet of wire soldered to the pathetic excuse for an antenna inside the USB receiver would help. I guess that's what I get when I pay $25 for a wireless keyboard/mouse...
First of all, would it kill you to proofread a little? I mean, sure, I think Mormons are morons, too, but...
I never said I had a problem with their position on gays and atheists/agnostics because they were "being intolerant." That's just putting words in my mouth. I have a problem with it because I believe that the positions they take on those issues are indefensible, based on primitive superstitions and narrow-minded interpretations of books of fairy tales. I don't care what religion we're talking about here, it's fundamentalism I have a problem with.
I also never suggested that they didn't have a right to their opinions, or even their practices. I never called for the government to force them to accept non-heterosexuals or non-believers. This is America, and they're free to think, do and say these things. But I'm also free to post on Slashdot what I think of them and their practices.
I simply expressed my personal opinion. I didn't claim to be impartial or unbiased - I'm posting in my role as "some asshole on the internet with an opinion." I'm not a journalist or scientist or anyone else who needs to remain impartial (or at least appear to do so). I used the word "infiltrate" not because it's the absolute best word I could have chosen to dispassionately describe the situation, but because that's what all this creeping fundamentalism seems like to me - a bunch of Inquisitors from the Dark Ages attempting to impose their narrow, rigid, fear-based, and most of all wrong, belief structures on everyone else, in any way they can. It pisses me off, and I'm here expressing that.
And what do the Democrats have to do with this? Do you mistakenly believe I support them? Sure, I'm voting for Obama in November, but not because I think the Democrats are any kind of paragons of virtue. Actually, I think they're a bunch of spineless pussies who refuse to take action on the issues they were elected to deal with. Bush and Cheney should have been impeached and this tragic joke of a war in Iraq should be over by now. But this is why Congress has an even lower approval rating than the President - the American people voted Democrats into office because of our collective disgust at this administration, and the Democrats sat back and did jack shit. So yeah, I'm pretty pissed at them, too. Don't go lumping me in with them.
The Boy Scouts still discriminate against atheists and homosexuals. They're also a huge organization with no shortage of cash, and they're infiltrated by ultra-conservative Mormons and other Jesus freaks. They're just looking for something for free. Fuck 'em.
Just keep chuggin along, eventually you'll get noticed and promoted. You shouldn't do the work for the credit, you should do it for the sake of the company and the greater good. That's when you really get noticed.
Yeah, really! Don't work for the money, or the recognition - do it for the Company and the Greater Good!
Why is it the staunch capitalists of the world insist that businesses should be subject to little or no regulation, doing whatever they can to make a buck, yet an employee who adopts such an attitude is told they they have a poor "work ethic," and that all the good little sheep just shut up, keep their heads down, and work longer and longer hours without added compensation, while the guys at the top pay themselves more and more while cutting benefits and jobs, all in the name of cost savings? The worst of them even run their companies into the ground, losing tens or hundreds of millions of dollars, while still getting paid millions from their golden parachutes? Seriously - what the fuck? When did this become A-OK with the general public?
I wonder how many of them realize how much they sound exactly like communists when they start going on about doing working for the "greater good." How is pointless self-sacrifice in the name of the Almighty Dollar any better than pointless self-sacrifice in the name of The Party? I know, I know... "Government is evil." Well, America's government is entirely run by people from big business now. Everything is being privatized, and the distinction between government and big business is almost non-existent at this point. So someone's going to have to remind me again how government is evil while big business is perfection incarnate.
What the original poster needs to do is get the hell out of corporate America. Believe it or not, there are other ways of making a living.
No. All my daemon processes keep running, and my filesystem is intact. That second one is especially important. Ever tried to recover a Windows system where NTFS has gone to hell? It's ugly as hell. And in answer to the original question about desktop apps - what does it matter? Most major apps have crash recovery anyway. If they're killed by a SIGPIPE or similar, they'll write out a recovery file and recover gracefully when you restart them. Firefox restarts with the same windows/tabs I had open. I imagine OOo at least has some crash recovery (I don't really use it, so I don't know). Even my preferred editors will save their contents if killed unexpectedly. And I don't care what my media player does. So, given the fact that crashes are inevitable in the real world, what's your point?
You mean what do I do when my X session crashes? Well, I run Kubuntu, so I can't speak for other distros, but when such a crash happens, one of four things occurs:
1. The login manager (kdm) restarts the X server and provides the usual login window. - This is by far the most common result. In this case, I simply log back in.
2. X fails to restart, kicking me back to the text console. - This is usually the result of me tampering with xorg.conf and getting something wrong. The solution is to fix whatever's preventing X from restarting, then restart manually with/etc/init.d/kdm start
3. The system hangs irrevocably. - If the Magic SysRq key trick doesn't work, hard-boot the system. This is extremely rare, but does occasionally happen.
4. The screen stays black, but the system is still alive. - Log in from another machine on my network using ssh, issue shutdown -r now
Nice troll, but I wasn't attempting to make some clandestine endorsement of Linux. I was simply mentioning that fact because I've seen bad video drivers do both - take down X, or take down the whole OS. It's a distinction that probably only matters to those of us who hang out on Slashdot for a bit of geek talk, rather than to troll.
I never really had problems with the Trident drivers crashing or anything like that. My problems with Trident are mostly related to personal experience. In the late 90's, I had several Trident SVGA cards that either worked like crap or didn't work at all on Xfree86. I bought a laptop back in 2001 that had a Trident chipset. In Linux, I could never get more than 640x480, 16-bit color, or 800x600 (the LCD's native resolution) in 8-bit color. It was horrible. A few years later I had the opportunity to get a good deal on a laptop at a bankruptcy auction, and once again, I get onboard Trident video! ARRGH!! The 2D acceleration is some of the worst I've ever seen. Video playback is marginal at best, since the CPU all gets eaten up pushing bits around the screen (I benchmarked video using mplayer and a null video output device, so I know the CPU/codec are plenty fast enough). It does OK in Windows XP, but that just makes it more frustrating, as I know the damned thing can do better 2D acceleration, but no matter what I tweak in xorg.conf, I end up with two choices - "bad" or "hideous."
Someday I'll buy a laptop that's not from the late Triassic period - one with on-board wireless, Bluetooth, and nVidia or Intel graphics. Until then, I'm cursed with Trident.
That's not how I remember it, actually. In the early/mid 90's I worked with a bunch of machines that had ATI Mach32/Mach64-based cards, and those things were great! They gave pretty much flawless, blazing-fast 2D performance. Of course, if you're talking about 1995 - 1997 or so, when 3D became a big deal (the era of 3Dfx Voodoo cards, etc.), that I'm not so sure about. For some reason I kept getting stuck with crappy machines that had atrocities like Trident video chipsets. Don't even get me started on how much I hate Trident.
I'm running the 169 series on Ubuntu Gutsy and I haven't had many problems. Sure, every once in a while (maybe every couple of weeks) X will crash (but not the whole OS). That's happened since I started using the nVidia drivers. Other than that, they've worked great for me. I mostly wanted 3D acceleration so I could use Google Earth and possibly experiment with compiz at some point (which I still haven't). Maybe if I was running compiz on my desktop I'd see more frequent problems.
I only wish it had worked that well for me. I did something very similar - MythTV machine (AMD64, dual-core) connected to LCD TV via HDMI. Huge pain in the ass to get working. I ended up having to dig deep into the nVidia documentation to find the various override switches to tell the card/driver that, yes, really, you can send a 1080p signal to this device, honest, I swear! Once I got it working it was a dream, but I spent at least two days dicking with it.
Even if someone does begin marketing these commercially, I don't see "cheap knock-offs" being a problem. It doesn't cost anything more to manufacture one of these with the correct dimensions (which is pretty much what determines its performance) than to make one with the wrong dimensions. The only thing that would likely make an antenna "cheap" in this sense is purely mechanical - inability to hold up in high winds, or to the sun's UV (I've seen some TV antennas with plastic components that were literally crumbling due to long-term UV exposure).
I run all the source games (includes half life 2 and all it's episodes, portal, hl2 death match,, team fortress 2) just fine, Steam and so on just fine under. I hear World of Warcraft runs quite well too.
Under what? So tantalizing a sentence, yet the most important word is left out...
I've been using Domainmonger since it was recommended by many Slashdotters back in the late 90s. Despite their higher-than-some $17/year rate, I find it well worth it. Every single time I've had a problem with anything (and that's rare), they've helped me out right away. They're well worth the money. I have hosting through 1and1.com, but given what I've heard about them, I think I'll keep Domainmonger as my actual registrar and just host my site on 1and1 - if 1and1 decides to fuck me, well, so be it - at least they can't take control of my domain.
Yup, it was indeed Vanessa Mae's version. But mostly, I'm posting this so I can link to a picture of her and point out that, damn, she's hot. Damn, damn, damn...
Slashdot Mirror
That's fine by me! I don't even come in to work until 11:00am or so.
I've got quite a bit of experience using a TV-B-Gone in Wal-Mart stores, so let me fill you in on some details.
First, much to my disappointment, the TV-B-Gone doesn't work on whatever model of TV they have hanging from the ceiling blaring ads all day long. I've tried a bunch of times in different stores, both with the stock TV-B-Gone and with one of Ladyada's kits, using hacked firmware with more manufacturers' codes in it. No luck. I've also tried looking for a make/model on the TV's themselves, but have never managed to find one. The front of the TV's are covered with a cardboard or plastic cover, and the backs are next to impossible to see from the floor.
When you walk into many Wal-Mart stores, there'll be a small monitor hanging from the ceiling showing a feed from one of the security cameras. At least in this case, it turns out the cameras can't see the IR from the TV-B-Gone. The cameras are probably the variety that come with IR filters. Why they'd choose such models, I have no idea. I also have no idea whether any of the other cameras in the store see the IR or not, but the ones feeding the displays near the doors definitely don't.
Nobody from security has ever bothered me about using my TV-B-Gone. This isn't the Pentagon, it's freakin' Wal-Mart. The security people are probably making $7 an hour and really don't give a rat's ass if some jackass like me with a high-tech toy is walking around turning off TV's, especially considering I'm also a paying customer. I may be bored enough to turn off TV's for fun, but I'm not bored enough to actually drive to Wal-Mart just for that purpose.
Yes, it's fun to turn off the big-screen TV's while Bubba and his rode-hard-and-put-up-wet girlfriend are gawking at them, trying to figure out which one will fit through the door of their double-wide. But that's nowhere near as much fun as turning off the TV's in the video game section when Bubba's pudgy little 10-year-old son is in the middle of playing some Xbox game.
Wow, it's a good thing scathing sarcasm isn't a sin, 'cause you'd totally be going to H-E-double-hockey-sticks. I suppose it could be argued that it's a form of pride, but I'll leave that up to the religious scholars.
Yes, it's true, I'm resorting to making cheap jokes. But what else can one do when confronted with the kind of rigid belief system put forth by the Christian fundamentalists? I don't mean to accuse you, or anyone else here, of being one of them - I realize there are moderate Christians who sincerely believe in Jesus and attempt to follow His word. But this doesn't seem to be true of the religious right in general. Jesus preached love and unity; they preach fear and divisiveness. And no amount of logical reasoning will change their minds. So I resort instead to humor - the universal solvent of fear. Whether I actually succeed in being funny or not is largely a matter of personal taste, but hey, I amuse myself, and I figure at least a few others may share my sense of humor.
Christians can care less if you attempt to smash Hadrons together.
But God help your immortal soul if you dare to try to smash hard-ons together. 'Cause that's a sin!
I couldn't agree more.
For lots of fun, answer "yes" to every single question a telemarketer asks. I think there's a video on YouTube of a guy doing this, but I tried it once, and it works. Wow, they sure get pissy after a while! At first it seems like the answer "yes" might make sense, but eventually they start asking for specific pieces of information, to which you keep replying, "yes!" I had to give up after a while because it was just too hard to suppress my laughter.
My call went something like this:
Telemarketer: "blah blah blah..."
Me: "Yes"
Telemarketer: "I'm looking for a specific number."
Me: "Yes"
Telemarketer: "OK, so what it it?"
Me: "Yes"
Telemarketer: "Sir, do you understand me? Do you understand the words coming out of my mouth!? I'm looking for a specific number!"
Me: "Yes"
Hams are not limited to 9600 baud by any kind of regulation. That's about as fast as you'll get on UHF with a single FM narrowband channel, but some of those crazy bastards working microwave frequencies have achieved digital data rates much higher than 9600 baud.
I actually tried this with a wireless keyboard/mouse I have that has dismal range (5 feet or so - beyond that it's unreliable). I was actually quite surprised that it made no perceptible difference. Maybe what I did just wasn't enough, or caused some weird impedance mismatch or something. The frequency was low - 49 MHz - so I figured an extra couple of feet of wire soldered to the pathetic excuse for an antenna inside the USB receiver would help. I guess that's what I get when I pay $25 for a wireless keyboard/mouse...
First of all, would it kill you to proofread a little? I mean, sure, I think Mormons are morons, too, but...
I never said I had a problem with their position on gays and atheists/agnostics because they were "being intolerant." That's just putting words in my mouth. I have a problem with it because I believe that the positions they take on those issues are indefensible, based on primitive superstitions and narrow-minded interpretations of books of fairy tales. I don't care what religion we're talking about here, it's fundamentalism I have a problem with.
I also never suggested that they didn't have a right to their opinions, or even their practices. I never called for the government to force them to accept non-heterosexuals or non-believers. This is America, and they're free to think, do and say these things. But I'm also free to post on Slashdot what I think of them and their practices.
I simply expressed my personal opinion. I didn't claim to be impartial or unbiased - I'm posting in my role as "some asshole on the internet with an opinion." I'm not a journalist or scientist or anyone else who needs to remain impartial (or at least appear to do so). I used the word "infiltrate" not because it's the absolute best word I could have chosen to dispassionately describe the situation, but because that's what all this creeping fundamentalism seems like to me - a bunch of Inquisitors from the Dark Ages attempting to impose their narrow, rigid, fear-based, and most of all wrong, belief structures on everyone else, in any way they can. It pisses me off, and I'm here expressing that.
And what do the Democrats have to do with this? Do you mistakenly believe I support them? Sure, I'm voting for Obama in November, but not because I think the Democrats are any kind of paragons of virtue. Actually, I think they're a bunch of spineless pussies who refuse to take action on the issues they were elected to deal with. Bush and Cheney should have been impeached and this tragic joke of a war in Iraq should be over by now. But this is why Congress has an even lower approval rating than the President - the American people voted Democrats into office because of our collective disgust at this administration, and the Democrats sat back and did jack shit. So yeah, I'm pretty pissed at them, too. Don't go lumping me in with them.
The Boy Scouts still discriminate against atheists and homosexuals. They're also a huge organization with no shortage of cash, and they're infiltrated by ultra-conservative Mormons and other Jesus freaks. They're just looking for something for free. Fuck 'em.
You do if you're an electronics geek and already have an oscilloscope. You can build something like this pretty easily.
Just keep chuggin along, eventually you'll get noticed and promoted. You shouldn't do the work for the credit, you should do it for the sake of the company and the greater good. That's when you really get noticed.
Yeah, really! Don't work for the money, or the recognition - do it for the Company and the Greater Good!
Why is it the staunch capitalists of the world insist that businesses should be subject to little or no regulation, doing whatever they can to make a buck, yet an employee who adopts such an attitude is told they they have a poor "work ethic," and that all the good little sheep just shut up, keep their heads down, and work longer and longer hours without added compensation, while the guys at the top pay themselves more and more while cutting benefits and jobs, all in the name of cost savings? The worst of them even run their companies into the ground, losing tens or hundreds of millions of dollars, while still getting paid millions from their golden parachutes? Seriously - what the fuck? When did this become A-OK with the general public?
I wonder how many of them realize how much they sound exactly like communists when they start going on about doing working for the "greater good." How is pointless self-sacrifice in the name of the Almighty Dollar any better than pointless self-sacrifice in the name of The Party? I know, I know... "Government is evil." Well, America's government is entirely run by people from big business now. Everything is being privatized, and the distinction between government and big business is almost non-existent at this point. So someone's going to have to remind me again how government is evil while big business is perfection incarnate.
What the original poster needs to do is get the hell out of corporate America. Believe it or not, there are other ways of making a living.
"...and where this is so it are noted in the text..."
Well, I hope it aren't noted using grammar like that.
No. All my daemon processes keep running, and my filesystem is intact. That second one is especially important. Ever tried to recover a Windows system where NTFS has gone to hell? It's ugly as hell. And in answer to the original question about desktop apps - what does it matter? Most major apps have crash recovery anyway. If they're killed by a SIGPIPE or similar, they'll write out a recovery file and recover gracefully when you restart them. Firefox restarts with the same windows/tabs I had open. I imagine OOo at least has some crash recovery (I don't really use it, so I don't know). Even my preferred editors will save their contents if killed unexpectedly. And I don't care what my media player does. So, given the fact that crashes are inevitable in the real world, what's your point?
You mean what do I do when my X session crashes? Well, I run Kubuntu, so I can't speak for other distros, but when such a crash happens, one of four things occurs:
/etc/init.d/kdm start
1. The login manager (kdm) restarts the X server and provides the usual login window. - This is by far the most common result. In this case, I simply log back in.
2. X fails to restart, kicking me back to the text console. - This is usually the result of me tampering with xorg.conf and getting something wrong. The solution is to fix whatever's preventing X from restarting, then restart manually with
3. The system hangs irrevocably. - If the Magic SysRq key trick doesn't work, hard-boot the system. This is extremely rare, but does occasionally happen.
4. The screen stays black, but the system is still alive. - Log in from another machine on my network using ssh, issue shutdown -r now
Nice troll, but I wasn't attempting to make some clandestine endorsement of Linux. I was simply mentioning that fact because I've seen bad video drivers do both - take down X, or take down the whole OS. It's a distinction that probably only matters to those of us who hang out on Slashdot for a bit of geek talk, rather than to troll.
I never really had problems with the Trident drivers crashing or anything like that. My problems with Trident are mostly related to personal experience. In the late 90's, I had several Trident SVGA cards that either worked like crap or didn't work at all on Xfree86. I bought a laptop back in 2001 that had a Trident chipset. In Linux, I could never get more than 640x480, 16-bit color, or 800x600 (the LCD's native resolution) in 8-bit color. It was horrible. A few years later I had the opportunity to get a good deal on a laptop at a bankruptcy auction, and once again, I get onboard Trident video! ARRGH!! The 2D acceleration is some of the worst I've ever seen. Video playback is marginal at best, since the CPU all gets eaten up pushing bits around the screen (I benchmarked video using mplayer and a null video output device, so I know the CPU/codec are plenty fast enough). It does OK in Windows XP, but that just makes it more frustrating, as I know the damned thing can do better 2D acceleration, but no matter what I tweak in xorg.conf, I end up with two choices - "bad" or "hideous."
Someday I'll buy a laptop that's not from the late Triassic period - one with on-board wireless, Bluetooth, and nVidia or Intel graphics. Until then, I'm cursed with Trident.
That's not how I remember it, actually. In the early/mid 90's I worked with a bunch of machines that had ATI Mach32/Mach64-based cards, and those things were great! They gave pretty much flawless, blazing-fast 2D performance. Of course, if you're talking about 1995 - 1997 or so, when 3D became a big deal (the era of 3Dfx Voodoo cards, etc.), that I'm not so sure about. For some reason I kept getting stuck with crappy machines that had atrocities like Trident video chipsets. Don't even get me started on how much I hate Trident.
I'm running the 169 series on Ubuntu Gutsy and I haven't had many problems. Sure, every once in a while (maybe every couple of weeks) X will crash (but not the whole OS). That's happened since I started using the nVidia drivers. Other than that, they've worked great for me. I mostly wanted 3D acceleration so I could use Google Earth and possibly experiment with compiz at some point (which I still haven't). Maybe if I was running compiz on my desktop I'd see more frequent problems.
I only wish it had worked that well for me. I did something very similar - MythTV machine (AMD64, dual-core) connected to LCD TV via HDMI. Huge pain in the ass to get working. I ended up having to dig deep into the nVidia documentation to find the various override switches to tell the card/driver that, yes, really, you can send a 1080p signal to this device, honest, I swear! Once I got it working it was a dream, but I spent at least two days dicking with it.
Even if someone does begin marketing these commercially, I don't see "cheap knock-offs" being a problem. It doesn't cost anything more to manufacture one of these with the correct dimensions (which is pretty much what determines its performance) than to make one with the wrong dimensions. The only thing that would likely make an antenna "cheap" in this sense is purely mechanical - inability to hold up in high winds, or to the sun's UV (I've seen some TV antennas with plastic components that were literally crumbling due to long-term UV exposure).
Alternate response: "Sorry, if you can't find your own shift key, you're not allowed to vote. Thank you, and God bless."
Isn't that exactly what Wine is? It's a Windows API implementation, not an emulator.
I run all the source games (includes half life 2 and all it's episodes, portal, hl2 death match,, team fortress 2) just fine, Steam and so on just fine under. I hear World of Warcraft runs quite well too.
Under what? So tantalizing a sentence, yet the most important word is left out...
I've been using Domainmonger since it was recommended by many Slashdotters back in the late 90s. Despite their higher-than-some $17/year rate, I find it well worth it. Every single time I've had a problem with anything (and that's rare), they've helped me out right away. They're well worth the money. I have hosting through 1and1.com, but given what I've heard about them, I think I'll keep Domainmonger as my actual registrar and just host my site on 1and1 - if 1and1 decides to fuck me, well, so be it - at least they can't take control of my domain.
Yup, it was indeed Vanessa Mae's version. But mostly, I'm posting this so I can link to a picture of her and point out that, damn, she's hot. Damn, damn, damn...