But I know dozens of people here who have DSL -- and nobody I knew was able to get DSL from a company other than Verizon.
Anecdotal evidence, to be sure, and it just so happens I have had the opposite experience. I wanted to get DSL service at my new apartment in Los Angeles, but Verizon told me it couldn't be done, that my line wouldn't support it.
Dejected, I sulked for a few days before someone from Speakeasy got back to me from when I'd talked to them before getting the "final" word on it from Verizon. I had Speakyeasy DSL within two weeks where Verizon said it was impossible.
I imagine in my case, just as in the cases you pointed out, it has to do with someone at the respective company not following through on the request.
A law is a law...and it's time corporations were held responsible. I expect the Feds to start handing out stiff penalties to processor manufacturers who fail to meet the law's demands.
Better yet, we should consider that the way to break Moore's Law is simply not to produce faster chips, which will be what happens when we reach the performance ceiling, that not producing faster chips is a circumvention device under the DMCA.
For its OS it was running OS/2, as opposed to MS/DOS, which made me feel much safer.
Why's that? There was nothing insecure about MS-DOS. Contrary to what you read on Slashdot, just because something was made by Microsoft doesn't mean it's crap.
And of course, accidents never happen. Just forget about that little fire in the Library of Alexandra.
While I realize you were being cynical, you've actually reinforced my point. We can't even preserve our heritage in classic media.
We can print a book, but it's gone if the library burns down. We can make a film but it's gone when the film's chemicals break down. We can make sculptures but they're gone when there's an earthquake and they fall over.
They'll only survive in the long term if someone finds the book useful enough to have a copy of their own. Or if someone likes the film enough to rip it and encode it as a VCD. Or if someone makes a mold and another cut of the sculpture... but even those things will break and wear out too.
Time has a way of eroding our best kept treasures, unless someone cares about it enough to keep it from fading away. So why do we believe that digital history is any different? Even if something's stored in a completely open, documented format, someone still has to care about it enough to tend to it, else we suddenly come to a day when we need to figure out how to get the data itself off some archaic storage device, and then we can find the source code, but only to find out that nobody knows or uses those archaic languages, C and C++, anymore (hey, I can dream can't I?).
This is just one early indication of how difficult it will be to maintain our digital heritage.
If something is truly of importance, it will be ported forward to new technologies before the existing technology becomes so out of date that recovering it becomes a Herculian effort, or it will also co-exist in a more future-proof medium. Otherwise it's simply dead data that's more than likely never going to have a need to be accessed again.... not every bit needs to be held forever.
Would the world have stopped turning if this little chunk of history gone unrecovered? No. Are there other forms of media (books, videos, music) from the 1980's that would have answered the same questions about culture and society that the data in this archive answers? Definately.
So, it may not be cognative dissonance in the people that use Linux/UNIX/Mac OS X... i would argure that your persepctive may be limited to more pedestrian computing needs.
I'd argue that most of the zealotry displayed by the more rabid Linux advocates is almost entirely cognative dissonance.
For example: Linux 2.2.x was great; and zealots claimed it could do no wrong.... until Linux 2.4 came out. Zealots rushed out and upgraded, singing the praises of 2.4 and decrying the shortcomings of the 2.2 series.
Of course, none of them ever really admitted that the memory manager in 2.4 sucked ass.... not really until it was changed. Then it was safe to badmouth the old memory manager. Go ahead and look back at Slashdot discussions over time to see the progression. And, in fact, you can see it today... as the next version of the kernel draws closer, dissent is slowly building about the rough edges on the current kernel.
It's also the reason that every minor IE bug is front page news here, while it takes a real whopper of a bug on a *nix platform to make Slashdot. Cognative dissonance is a large part of that sort of zealotry as well. The opinion from the top of a pedestal that "my OS is more secure than yours". (The zealots really hate it when you point out that the nitpick bugs they point to in Windows wouldn't have affected a properly set up and administered system anyway.)
...all the promised music and video-on-demand that was supposed to be the killer app for broadband access never materialized thanks to plenty of legal manuevering by the RIAA and MPAA.
But people like the lower latency and the fact their web pages pop up quicker, so it doesn't matter that there's no real need for the average person to have a giant pipe.
But those were moral doubts about the applications of the science, not the research itself. No one told Fermi, when he was building his first atomic pile, that he must stop immediately because There Are Things Man Was Not Meant To Know.
I bet Socrates would have something to add to this discussion.
It'll help keep cheaters off XBox Live. A cheat-free online game experience is something most people I know would give their first-born for.
And as fair as the implication that Microsoft banning people who've modded their XBox, as soon as you modded your XBox, stop whining and just take some responsibility for your actions. It's not like you didn't know full well what you were getting yourself into when you cracked open the case and started messing around with a soldering iron.
Re:Wow. How disgusting.
on
ALICE vs. ALICE
·
· Score: 5, Funny
and treated as sex objects even though those of us who dare to go usually have quite valid opinions.
Warning! If you're a zealot, you might want to just pass over this comment, because you'll surely be offended by some of it.
What's keeping me on Windows?
First and foremost, there no compelling reason for me to switch off of Windows. Linux offers nothing that I can't get on Windows.
I don't give a damn about Microsoft's business practices, or how they treat their competitors.
Similarly, I don't give a damn about patent issues or licensing. I just want to be able to open that DOC file without some crappy import filter screwing it up. Emailing the sender back and ask them for the file in another format just because my platform of choice doesn't conform to de facto standards isn't my idea of a good time.
Linux GUIs are ass compared to Windows. Sorry, someone has to say it. Even with the popular themes, and even with all the improved fonts installed, and even with all the antialiased text patches installed, it still looks chunky and uneven. Sit someone in front of a screenshot of text under KDE with all the fancy options enabled, and a screenshot of Times New Roman, both under XP's ClearType, under Windows standard antialiasing, and under Windows non-antialiasing, and they'll point to the KDE text as looking the worst. And that's not even getting into the usability issues with KDE and Gnome. And the clipboard! Oh god don't even get me started on the clipboard. I know there's a standard somewhere for how applications should store data on the clipboard in X for compatibility, but nobody uses it; and that makes the clipboard pretty much useless. Considering the clipboard is one of the most used features of a GUI, that's a big handicap.
With only a small handful of exceptions, games run on Windows and not Linux.
Windows has Photoshop. The Gimp sucks. Anyone who works seriously with graphics would agree on this point. The interface is absolutely abysmal.
I like Internet Explorer. I like the interface, I like the way the UI is responsive, I like the fact that pages just work in it. I could give a flying fuck less about W3C standards support.
I like not having to edit text configuration files for basic OS functionality. I'm sure people get their jollies on editing/etc/resolv.conf, but I'd rather be doing things with my computer.
I don't really like the GPL. If the software were truly Free, there wouldn't be any restrictions on redistributing it. I enjoy tinkering with code and I'd hate to release some fun little trinket of a program then find out that I'm required to provide source code access to it in perpituity because I link against a GPL'd library. Linux advocates seem more interested in enforcing their licenses than Microsoft is!
The various versions of Windows are generally compatible with each other. This is not often the case with various Linux distributions. You not only have to worry about your kernel version, but the versions of all your various libraries, your utility programs, and where your distribution vendor put various paths. It's "DLL Hell" to the extreme.
I bothered to figure out how to get rid of that stupid inward bevel that surrounds KDE's taskbar. It's unnecessary, and it makes the taskbar look cluttered.
I can plug my digital camera in my Windows XP box and it's not only supported right off the bat, but it has both a wizard to extract the pictures, and it also is integrated right into Explorer to let me view the pictures on the camera like it was any other drive on my system.
I can't stand most of the vocal Linux advocates. They're like children. I don't put any trust in the technical abilities of someone who insists on spelling Microsoft with a $ instead of an S, or someone who still thinks the picture of Bill Gates as Borg is funny, or someone who claims that Windows95 was unstable because Microsoft made it that way on purpose. I almost hate to recommend Linux for any project because I don't want to be lumped in with that very vocal group.
That's pretty much the biggest issues that keep me on Windows.
...and so on. These helpful pointers are treated as if they were the ripest wisdom, but actually they're just common sense. They're obvious to anyone who isn't retarded. The few things in XP that are controversial (like pair programming) don't work.
Sure, they may be common sense, but how many people do you know that follow them?
Pretty much everyone agrees that unit tests on paper are a good idea. But the people who actually code unit tests are a much smaller number. XP isn't so much about revolutionary ideas as it is about providing a methodology to make sure all that 'common sense' gets used in practice.
It's not a silver bullet, though. It works wonders in some situations, and in other situations, it hinders more than it helps. Your team can't be too large, and your client has to 'play ball' by the rules of what XP asks of them, or else it falls apart.
Blackcomb is a mountain range that passes through Whistler in British Columbia (at least, that's what I can make out from a quick Google search). I guess that's their way of saying that it is a successor to Whistler.
And a.NET is what fishermen in British Columbia use, which is obviously less advanced than a ski resort or a mountain.
this is why the idea of GNU/HURD is important for the future
...and has been for the last 20 years!
Re:I remember when it was the best...
on
Altavista Renewed
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· Score: 2
It's a bizarre conspiracy theory. What possible reason would Google have to consciously decide to drop somethingawful.com, instead of their algorithm simply dropping it? Why would they have their employees spend time deliberately finding sites to screw over? Your hypothesis fails Occam's Razor.
No, actually, it passes Occam's Razor quite easily. Given the symptom "The highly popular internet site somethingawful.com does not appear in Google's search results anywhere, not page 1, not page 10, not page 1000, which of the following is true..."
A) Google's new PageRank system for some reason decided not to index it at all.
or, B) Google is specifically blocking the site from its index.
B sounds like the simplest solution. Especially given that the first few pages of search results for the term are filled with pages that refer to the site itself, PageRank in any shape or form should at least index the site itself in some capacity.
But that's just one example of Google's downward slide in the quality department lately. There are plenty of other examples, such as a search for "reservation hotel". The number one match, the match that the trustworthly-until-recently "I'm Feeling Lucky" button would send you to is a blind link that goes nowhere relevant -- in fact, it seems like it's one that was specifically targetted to get search engine ranking under the old guard of search engines, your Altavista, your Excite, and what have you.
The biggest problem is that this is not uncommon anymore. The quality of Google's results has, by all accounts, taken a downturn recently. I'm not saying that it's not Google's perogative to change their algorithm as they see fit, and this is not some penis-size rant about my site's former PageRank (in fact my site's PageRank hasn't changed), but this is a rant about Google's tinkering turning them from the gold standard of searching into Just Another Search Engine. Alltheweb.com gives better results nowadays.
The problem is that Google threw the baby out with the bathwater. They had their guns aimed at the blogging community who were Googlebombing various (unpopular) search words. Sure, they've fixed that problem, but at what cost? At the cost of at least one user... I certainly don't rely on Google anymore. They've been shown to remove sites from their index silently and without any apparent reason, and their results aren't as good as they used to be.
Judge it however you'd like, your viewpoint on it is your decision in the end; all I can do is provide the evidence of Google's missteps that led me to my decision.
Re:I remember when it was the best...
on
Altavista Renewed
·
· Score: 2
Also, Google will never get flashvertisements or anything of that sort. They know one of the main reasons people use their site is the clean interface with no annoying ads. They won't abandon that. They're making a very good profit just the way it is.
Maybe. But then again, they also knew one of the main reason people use their site is the good quality of search results it gets, but that hasn't stopped them from making major changes to their ranking algorithms which have, in many cases, turned the results given to absolute garbage.
In addition they've recently begun exercising what appears to be editorial control over the sites in their index. A Google search for "something awful" doesn't bring up the popular site www.somethingawful.comanywhere in the results. Google unilaterally decided that the site shouldn't exist anymore, so they don't list it. And to this date, they haven't given a reason why.
So never say that Google won't do something because they know better; it's becoming more and more obvious every day that they're picking up the same bad habits that every other search engine company has picked up.
Consumers aren't going to run out and buy all new hardware just to support a new format that gives them really no added capabilities over their existing hardware.... CD-Audio is good enough quality sound; this new format doesn't offer enough of an improvement for it to catch on -- and that'd be the case even if the formats weren't fair-use crippled. Once you throw that into the equation, these formats have an even dimmer potential.
A format doesn't begin mass market acceptance until the fanatic audiophiles buy into it at the beginning, and those are exactly the types of people who will raise the biggest stink about the copy protection, and the lack of digital audio out.
Can someone please explain to me how this is damaging to society? I guess maybe if they were downloading boyband mp3s... but other than that..
Uncapping your cable modem means you're using more than your allocated share of your neighborhood's cable data bandwidth, which deprives other, legitmately paying customers of the bandwidth they're paying for. In addition to screwing your neighbors, you're also using more than your appropriated portion of the cable company's uplink bandwidth from their local station out to the rest of the internet.... if uncapping your cable modem was popular on a large scale, one of two things would happen: Prices would go up (for everyone!) since the cable company needs to buy more bandwidth for everyone; everyone's "extra" bandwidth would prove useless, in fact they might even get less overall speed than they would have normally, as everyone's overtaxing the same pipe.
As far as it being "damaging to society"... it's probably not on the large scale, but that doesn't mean that the theft should go unpunished. By that logic, since violent felonies are more damaging to society than misdemeanors, all resources should be dedicated to the felonies while society degenerates under the collective weight of petty crimes.
Bullshit. How about "I had an insecure password", or "I responded to one of those emails from a scammer that claimed to be PayPal", or "Another system I use was compromised and I stupidly use the same password everywhere" instead?
I'm gonna guess one of those scenarios is more likely than any security failing on PayPal's part. Certainly if there was a security hole in PayPal itself, there are much bigger fish to go after -- any of eBay's Power Sellers, for instance, probably have much more than $500 or so in their accounts at any given moment.
There isn't any reason to be using NetBIOS across the Internet period.
Please suggest a better way for me to map a drive letter on my Windows XP machine to my Linux web server in a colocation center.
Samba works pretty good, but if there's no reason to be using NetBIOS across the Internet, there must be a better solution, so lay it on me; I'm all ears.
Slashdot Mirror
But I know dozens of people here who have DSL -- and nobody I knew was able to get DSL from a company other than Verizon.
Anecdotal evidence, to be sure, and it just so happens I have had the opposite experience. I wanted to get DSL service at my new apartment in Los Angeles, but Verizon told me it couldn't be done, that my line wouldn't support it.
Dejected, I sulked for a few days before someone from Speakeasy got back to me from when I'd talked to them before getting the "final" word on it from Verizon. I had Speakyeasy DSL within two weeks where Verizon said it was impossible.
I imagine in my case, just as in the cases you pointed out, it has to do with someone at the respective company not following through on the request.
A law is a law...and it's time corporations were held responsible.
I expect the Feds to start handing out stiff penalties to processor manufacturers who fail to meet the law's demands.
Better yet, we should consider that the way to break Moore's Law is simply not to produce faster chips, which will be what happens when we reach the performance ceiling, that not producing faster chips is a circumvention device under the DMCA.
For its OS it was running OS/2, as opposed to MS/DOS, which made me feel much safer.
Why's that? There was nothing insecure about MS-DOS. Contrary to what you read on Slashdot, just because something was made by Microsoft doesn't mean it's crap.
shouldn't be allowed to work before coffee- I posted this at like 8:20 and must've forgotten to click that all important 'Save' button.
That's ok, I'm sure we'd have seen the story the next two times it's going to run on Slashdot.
And of course, accidents never happen. Just forget about that little fire in the Library of Alexandra.
While I realize you were being cynical, you've actually reinforced my point. We can't even preserve our heritage in classic media.
We can print a book, but it's gone if the library burns down. We can make a film but it's gone when the film's chemicals break down. We can make sculptures but they're gone when there's an earthquake and they fall over.
They'll only survive in the long term if someone finds the book useful enough to have a copy of their own. Or if someone likes the film enough to rip it and encode it as a VCD. Or if someone makes a mold and another cut of the sculpture... but even those things will break and wear out too.
Time has a way of eroding our best kept treasures, unless someone cares about it enough to keep it from fading away. So why do we believe that digital history is any different? Even if something's stored in a completely open, documented format, someone still has to care about it enough to tend to it, else we suddenly come to a day when we need to figure out how to get the data itself off some archaic storage device, and then we can find the source code, but only to find out that nobody knows or uses those archaic languages, C and C++, anymore (hey, I can dream can't I?).
This is just one early indication of how difficult it will be to maintain our digital heritage.
If something is truly of importance, it will be ported forward to new technologies before the existing technology becomes so out of date that recovering it becomes a Herculian effort, or it will also co-exist in a more future-proof medium. Otherwise it's simply dead data that's more than likely never going to have a need to be accessed again.... not every bit needs to be held forever.
Would the world have stopped turning if this little chunk of history gone unrecovered? No. Are there other forms of media (books, videos, music) from the 1980's that would have answered the same questions about culture and society that the data in this archive answers? Definately.
So, it may not be cognative dissonance in the people that use Linux/UNIX/Mac OS X... i would argure that your persepctive may be limited to more pedestrian computing needs.
I'd argue that most of the zealotry displayed by the more rabid Linux advocates is almost entirely cognative dissonance.
For example: Linux 2.2.x was great; and zealots claimed it could do no wrong.... until Linux 2.4 came out. Zealots rushed out and upgraded, singing the praises of 2.4 and decrying the shortcomings of the 2.2 series.
Of course, none of them ever really admitted that the memory manager in 2.4 sucked ass.... not really until it was changed. Then it was safe to badmouth the old memory manager. Go ahead and look back at Slashdot discussions over time to see the progression. And, in fact, you can see it today... as the next version of the kernel draws closer, dissent is slowly building about the rough edges on the current kernel.
It's also the reason that every minor IE bug is front page news here, while it takes a real whopper of a bug on a *nix platform to make Slashdot. Cognative dissonance is a large part of that sort of zealotry as well. The opinion from the top of a pedestal that "my OS is more secure than yours". (The zealots really hate it when you point out that the nitpick bugs they point to in Windows wouldn't have affected a properly set up and administered system anyway.)
Slashdot seems to really think I like stories about Tivo... this is the second one the editors have recommended this week!
*thumbs down**thumbs down**thumbs down*
...all the promised music and video-on-demand that was supposed to be the killer app for broadband access never materialized thanks to plenty of legal manuevering by the RIAA and MPAA.
But people like the lower latency and the fact their web pages pop up quicker, so it doesn't matter that there's no real need for the average person to have a giant pipe.
But those were moral doubts about the applications of the science, not the research itself. No one told Fermi, when he was building his first atomic pile, that he must stop immediately because There Are Things Man Was Not Meant To Know.
I bet Socrates would have something to add to this discussion.
It'll help keep cheaters off XBox Live. A cheat-free online game experience is something most people I know would give their first-born for.
And as fair as the implication that Microsoft banning people who've modded their XBox, as soon as you modded your XBox, stop whining and just take some responsibility for your actions. It's not like you didn't know full well what you were getting yourself into when you cracked open the case and started messing around with a soldering iron.
and treated as sex objects even though those of us who dare to go usually have quite valid opinions.
:p
So... vi or emacs?
We'll see just how "valid" your opinions are.
What's keeping me on Windows?
That's pretty much the biggest issues that keep me on Windows.
Will it push Grandma down the stairs? Grandma needs to be protected!
...and so on. These helpful pointers are treated as if they were the ripest wisdom, but actually they're just common sense. They're obvious to anyone who isn't retarded. The few things in XP that are controversial (like pair programming) don't work.
Sure, they may be common sense, but how many people do you know that follow them?
Pretty much everyone agrees that unit tests on paper are a good idea. But the people who actually code unit tests are a much smaller number. XP isn't so much about revolutionary ideas as it is about providing a methodology to make sure all that 'common sense' gets used in practice.
It's not a silver bullet, though. It works wonders in some situations, and in other situations, it hinders more than it helps. Your team can't be too large, and your client has to 'play ball' by the rules of what XP asks of them, or else it falls apart.
Blackcomb is a mountain range that passes through Whistler in British Columbia (at least, that's what I can make out from a quick Google search). I guess that's their way of saying that it is a successor to Whistler.
.NET is what fishermen in British Columbia use, which is obviously less advanced than a ski resort or a mountain.
And a
this is why the idea of GNU/HURD is important for the future
...and has been for the last 20 years!
It's a bizarre conspiracy theory. What possible reason would Google have to consciously decide to drop somethingawful.com, instead of their algorithm simply dropping it? Why would they have their employees spend time deliberately finding sites to screw over? Your hypothesis fails Occam's Razor.
No, actually, it passes Occam's Razor quite easily. Given the symptom "The highly popular internet site somethingawful.com does not appear in Google's search results anywhere, not page 1, not page 10, not page 1000, which of the following is true..."
A) Google's new PageRank system for some reason decided not to index it at all.
or, B) Google is specifically blocking the site from its index.
B sounds like the simplest solution. Especially given that the first few pages of search results for the term are filled with pages that refer to the site itself, PageRank in any shape or form should at least index the site itself in some capacity.
But that's just one example of Google's downward slide in the quality department lately. There are plenty of other examples, such as a search for "reservation hotel". The number one match, the match that the trustworthly-until-recently "I'm Feeling Lucky" button would send you to is a blind link that goes nowhere relevant -- in fact, it seems like it's one that was specifically targetted to get search engine ranking under the old guard of search engines, your Altavista, your Excite, and what have you.
The biggest problem is that this is not uncommon anymore. The quality of Google's results has, by all accounts, taken a downturn recently. I'm not saying that it's not Google's perogative to change their algorithm as they see fit, and this is not some penis-size rant about my site's former PageRank (in fact my site's PageRank hasn't changed), but this is a rant about Google's tinkering turning them from the gold standard of searching into Just Another Search Engine. Alltheweb.com gives better results nowadays.
The problem is that Google threw the baby out with the bathwater. They had their guns aimed at the blogging community who were Googlebombing various (unpopular) search words. Sure, they've fixed that problem, but at what cost? At the cost of at least one user... I certainly don't rely on Google anymore. They've been shown to remove sites from their index silently and without any apparent reason, and their results aren't as good as they used to be.
Judge it however you'd like, your viewpoint on it is your decision in the end; all I can do is provide the evidence of Google's missteps that led me to my decision.
Also, Google will never get flashvertisements or anything of that sort. They know one of the main reasons people use their site is the clean interface with no annoying ads. They won't abandon that. They're making a very good profit just the way it is.
Maybe. But then again, they also knew one of the main reason people use their site is the good quality of search results it gets, but that hasn't stopped them from making major changes to their ranking algorithms which have, in many cases, turned the results given to absolute garbage.
In addition they've recently begun exercising what appears to be editorial control over the sites in their index. A Google search for "something awful" doesn't bring up the popular site www.somethingawful.com anywhere in the results. Google unilaterally decided that the site shouldn't exist anymore, so they don't list it. And to this date, they haven't given a reason why.
So never say that Google won't do something because they know better; it's becoming more and more obvious every day that they're picking up the same bad habits that every other search engine company has picked up.
Consumers aren't going to run out and buy all new hardware just to support a new format that gives them really no added capabilities over their existing hardware.... CD-Audio is good enough quality sound; this new format doesn't offer enough of an improvement for it to catch on -- and that'd be the case even if the formats weren't fair-use crippled. Once you throw that into the equation, these formats have an even dimmer potential.
A format doesn't begin mass market acceptance until the fanatic audiophiles buy into it at the beginning, and those are exactly the types of people who will raise the biggest stink about the copy protection, and the lack of digital audio out.
...News for Nerds, 0-Day Warez!
Can someone please explain to me how this is damaging to society? I guess maybe if they were downloading boyband mp3s... but other than that..
Uncapping your cable modem means you're using more than your allocated share of your neighborhood's cable data bandwidth, which deprives other, legitmately paying customers of the bandwidth they're paying for. In addition to screwing your neighbors, you're also using more than your appropriated portion of the cable company's uplink bandwidth from their local station out to the rest of the internet.... if uncapping your cable modem was popular on a large scale, one of two things would happen: Prices would go up (for everyone!) since the cable company needs to buy more bandwidth for everyone; everyone's "extra" bandwidth would prove useless, in fact they might even get less overall speed than they would have normally, as everyone's overtaxing the same pipe.
As far as it being "damaging to society"... it's probably not on the large scale, but that doesn't mean that the theft should go unpunished. By that logic, since violent felonies are more damaging to society than misdemeanors, all resources should be dedicated to the felonies while society degenerates under the collective weight of petty crimes.
"...system is notoriously insecure"
Bullshit. How about "I had an insecure password", or "I responded to one of those emails from a scammer that claimed to be PayPal", or "Another system I use was compromised and I stupidly use the same password everywhere" instead?
I'm gonna guess one of those scenarios is more likely than any security failing on PayPal's part. Certainly if there was a security hole in PayPal itself, there are much bigger fish to go after -- any of eBay's Power Sellers, for instance, probably have much more than $500 or so in their accounts at any given moment.
If only we were all using Windows this could have been avoided. :(
There isn't any reason to be using NetBIOS across the Internet period.
Please suggest a better way for me to map a drive letter on my Windows XP machine to my Linux web server in a colocation center.
Samba works pretty good, but if there's no reason to be using NetBIOS across the Internet, there must be a better solution, so lay it on me; I'm all ears.