Can anyone give a count of DSL users in North America?
Here in Toronto, a while ago most ISPs were disconnected one morning, and the tech support said it was an ATM problem. At the backbone level, ISPs take their connections off ATM routers, just look at ciscos line of offering of ATM routers and switches. Theres a demand behind all that.
QoS is used by many routers by many providers to improve VoIP, and by some providers to improve gaming and other lowlatency applications.
This guy who wrote than ATM is a failure, entered his article in slashdot, with a BIG chance his HTTP POST passed through several ATM routers before reaching Slashdot servers. Does he know this?
Ive been wondering about it ever since I heard how they plan to land Spirit. Why not use a parachute? Airbags seem like an awefully tough way to let equipment survive smacking straight into a planet.
Havent you all seen the videos of jeeps and tanks tossed out from the C-130s in Iraq with parachutes? Most of those seem to land just fine.. and it should be easier on Mars..
RPCs are inherently insecure and introduces a balancing act of keeping the algorithms secure while keeping an eye on inputs and making sure nothing gets memory-leaked.
All this overhead also will take resources. So whats is it exactly youre working on that needs RPCs? Most networked applications Ive seen doesnt need RPCs, especially ones that are secure and efficient.
I wonder if you can attach quad monitors, quad mice and keyboards, and have a lanparty on once CPU. I know the radeon 9800 can go that far and already does miltiple monitors, I know of X projects to use multiple USB mice simultaneously and possibly multiple USB keyboards too.
"I've seen companies exhibit that same mentality, and I've never been able to understand it"
I hear ya. But a company is not just a collection of people. MBA courses cost so much for a reason... because theres a whole social legal and financial mechanism to companies, and really no one person's opinion matters 100%, not even the president's. Everyone below him is more afraid of making an obvious silly mistake than bringing a weak expensive solution. I've seen at least one place where all the bosses knew Linux well but had to use Win2000 for the sake of investors. I wouldnt be surprised if 60% of the investors knew Linux is backed by IBM and is more secure than Windows, but they have other measurements of the appropriateness of an Operating System.
I install and configure Windows2000 and XP day in and day out on dozens of machines, but you know, when I have a computer with no NIC drivers... I boot in Knoppix to fetch them online. The company has an OpenBSD firewall, two other Linux servers and even an ancient SCO UNIX box to control a machine. We desperately need a large Linux company to send men in ties and good promises to man our meetings and give us a ticket to openly use the OS that we're using under the sheets.
When our firewall got hacked and I was reimplementing it in Linux or OpenBSD, I was constantly being asked, what is Linux, how much does it cost?
I used to tell em its free but they'd give me the look that Ive fallen for a nigerian scammer or havent read between the lines, or stealing software.
Nothing in life comes free... I got that twice as I was setting up the firewall. They also needed a big company behind the software regardless of my opinion of its stability. IT experts around the globe understand and respect opensource operaring systems, but companies as a whole cant put their trust into Linux. Microsoft is a face. It has an address and everyone knows that address. There are phone numbers to call and people to threaten should things break. You cannot call a kid in a garage and threaten him.
So companies like RedHat leaving out desktop users and focusing on business are doing Linux a favor. They're doing IT technicians in those companies a favor by allowing them to use what they trust in most. Once you have every institution use a Linux or BSD server as a redundant firewall or file server... other applications for it will spring up, and that tide, Microsoft cant go against.
Take a hint. Voice recognition has been vaporware since the 60s. Every futuristic movie shows a pretty lady talking to her house turning on lights and making coffee. We've got way too much CPU power in hour houses for that, so wheres voice recognition?
The truth is, we dont need it. As impressive as voice recognition sounds, its application is limited to archival and military use.
Next you'll say NVIDIA and AMD will design their systems around Duke Nukem Forever.
I know many posts here talk of computers older than this, but I think the Commodore had pretty advanced graphics and a large library of nice games along with being a computer that you could open programs in and PEEK in the code.
That was my first computer. I think it took me almost a week to figure out how to run the first game.... what was it... load prog.run,8,1 run..
It really gave me a head start into BASIC, but I was pretty jealous of a friend later with a 8088 XT, who could run GWBASIC and draw circles, while I was busy building tables of peeks and pokes.
I've never been a real fan of cutting edge computers. If I had the money to buy an Athlon64, 1GB ram, 260GB SATA disk, Radeon 9800XT.... I'll spend it on an RS/6000 40P and an AS/400 system. I recently had a blast learning the very weird OpenVMS on a miniVAX I obtained from a company. Wish I had the hardware to run MULTICS.
Pretty senseless to say gathering scientists in one spot increases their contribution to pollution. They would pollute in their respective cities anyway if they didnt travel.
Its fine to invest in gathering scientists despite their pollution for the purpose of deciding how to reduce pollution. Their solutions might be implemented on a global scale to reduce pollution on a much wider scale.
Better yet invite all scientists to arrive in San Francisco on bycicles. All those scientists losing weight will also fit more of them in the meeting room.
I used to have a pile of joysticks and pads during the days of Atari 2600 and the Commodore64. We used to break them, open them and fix em, then break them again, then buy a new one...
Gaming has changed enormously since. Quake2, half-life etc need the keyboard and mouse for a full-level of control (I prefer a trackball to the mouse), which cant be had with a gamepad. strategic games too cant be really played without all the keyboard buttons like Warcraft III. Games that were ported to consoles without a keyboard like duke nukem and counterstrike lost out for the lack of such precise controls there, and playstation 2 made good headway by introducing a keyboard and mouse.
Just as flightsims have died on the PC just because not many people have joysticks and flying an F16 is tough with the keyboard and not much fun, joysticks and gamepads are losing out in the market because most games require the precise control of a mouse and many keys. Gamepads are still really useful for older games through mame etc, for the games that were designed for joysticks, but not everyone plays those.
One thing to explore is kgens for windows which allows sega genesis games to be played across the Internet or a LAN, multiplayer.
I've never gotten the very rationale for all the work being done on Mozilla. I can understand a good standards-compliant and full-featured browser, but on one hand, Opera does a great job if you dont care about opensource like 99% of the users, and the rest simply use the IE that come with their OSes. Mozilla as many people have admitted is over-featured, but Firebird is not seeing much action in development either.
So I think Mozilla is a bit of a developer challenge to see how many ports it can run on... but quite honestly, even most opensource users dont really use mozilla. Konquerer, and even the older netscape communicator do a reasonable job for most webpages without needing a fat CPU. I tried hard to run Mozilla on my Sun Ultra 5 with 128mb RAM and Solaris 9, but had to settle on opera for performance reasons.
So can someone who has been using Mozilla for along time explain the reason for all this work on Mozilla? Is it for some practical or business purpose like Samba, Apache, X, gaim, or is it attracting developers for other reasons?
I recently replaced all model M keyboards at home (4 systems) to the newer IBM keyboards that come with netvistas. I was browsing around and found my favorite changed from the old model Ms to the newer IBMs and a few dell keyboards. The newer ones are nice and quite, but the problem stays. To find a truly good keyboard that is also quite is next to impossible. Ive seen the really quite types but I couldnt use them... the keys dont seem to bounce back so easily. Some of them had crappy plastic and was completely unusable.
This thread along with the previous silent mouse is pretty important to me. Beside bothering the crowd around, I feel model M types also bother me as I work. You can concentrate more on your work in complete silence.
Those icky people eat snakes and cats, and it were the poor kittens in cages where SARS started out from. AIDS too started in Africa from some kind of sexual contact with Chimps.
Like all diseases, SARS too must have come from people very different from us because they're barbaric/savages/weird/icky. We're too clean to spawn diseases although due to sheer bad luck we were hit bad.
We should begin with banning all flights from China and Hong Kong. THAT oughtta fix it.
Sometimes a letter might not reach its destination if its left open. Close the letter, SCO probably has enough of a company left there to have a letter-opener.
An overwhelming number of programmers, software and web developers I know went "yeah I know Java". They dont really have a clue about real structured programming as in the Linux kernel, almost never heard of code optimisations and look great in a tie.
Universities are churning out students of ADA, Pascal and Java, most of whom applied to the university thinking of the good fortunes of being in IT around 1998.
I doubt many of the developers of the applications in sourceforge will be in this number. A market booms, you get hundereds of thousands of extra golddiggers, then it goes bust, the golddiggers leave, the ones dedicated to the art stay, the market booms again, the golddiggers return, the experienced ones make good money and buy McLarens.
Fewer programmers mean a guy who can port Linux or NetBSD to a specialized ARM MCU will be more in demand, and will not get laid off like today. It by no means means the cults and culture that churn out the code for sourcecode will disappear.
I really dont get that question. How can a technology be ready or not ready? It is being shipped and it apparently performs to specs. Like you said it challenges P4 in terms of value, which might answer that question.
A certain number of vendors are making motherboards for it. When you have one or possibly two companies making chipsets, you might have an issue, but with a large number of chipsets and drivers getting mature, you might have the right timing for it.
One other benefit of buying a product early in its selling cycle is that youll have a current product for a longer period of time. Buy a P4 when its really cheap, and youll have a new chip from Intel in the next 6 months.
I am curious about your applications though. What is it for which a P4 2.4GHz doesnt suffice? My P3 550 is giving me good service through games, video and 3d model editing...
I went from Sympatico to Rogers to Sympatico and now looking elsewhere here in Toronto. About 4 years ago, they were offering the same speed at the same cost with no limits. Naturally bandwidth costs fall over time but theyve frozen between the two monopolists in Ontario.
Whats funny they quitely implemented bandwidth limits that are pretty rediculous, and Sympatico has even blocked port 25. In another incident when I was trying to explain network problems to a customerservice rep at Sympatico, I kept switching between win98 and linux to exhaust all their over-the-phone tests so they know the problem is on their side. Well, when he heard "Linux" he went bonkers and told me there was no way he is helping me with any further issues and I shouldnt waste his time.
So now we're paying an average of $65 per month for our usage, which does not support Linux, let alone the openvmx, solaris and openbsd that I have at home.
Here in winter, we've shut down our rack fans, turned off ACs and are looking at ways to make ourselves warmer. We could use some aussi machines to help in this time of need. Canada has enough electricity to export
In our company, we have tonnes of old Pentium1 machines and copies of windows95/98 and NT4. Many have been donated to schools but still more are piled in our cabinets, so we decided to use them as Terminal Service clients at various locations on the factory floor. With WindowsNT, it becomes stable and secure enough not to need constant maintenance.
At home, I have two Pentium1s with old 14" monitors and Windows95. The OS runs well with 32-64MB ram and many nice old games some of which require DOS interrupts, others that access the framebuffer and soundblaster buffers directly, work very well. I have yet to find ways to run those old nice games on Windows2000 or XP.
The newer computers that we're buying nowadays are shipped with Windows2000. We do not prefer XP and will certainly avoid the upcoming 2003. As the older computers with Windows2000 will become obsolete, we'll use their licenses on newer workstations with Pentium4 2.2GHZ and 512mb ram, should work nicely.
I just dont like what Microsoft did with XP onwards. They tried to make the OS smart on its own and guess network configurations, which becomes a nightmare for net admins. We'll eventually move to XP, after the next OS after 2003 ships. Till then we'll try our best to keep the Windows2000 copies around, while using Windows95 with Terminal Services where it works for us.
Slashdot Mirror
Can anyone give a count of DSL users in North America?
Here in Toronto, a while ago most ISPs were disconnected one morning, and the tech support said it was an ATM problem. At the backbone level, ISPs take their connections off ATM routers, just look at ciscos line of offering of ATM routers and switches. Theres a demand behind all that.
QoS is used by many routers by many providers to improve VoIP, and by some providers to improve gaming and other lowlatency applications.
This guy who wrote than ATM is a failure, entered his article in slashdot, with a BIG chance his HTTP POST passed through several ATM routers before reaching Slashdot servers. Does he know this?
Ive been wondering about it ever since I heard how they plan to land Spirit. Why not use a parachute? Airbags seem like an awefully tough way to let equipment survive smacking straight into a planet.
Havent you all seen the videos of jeeps and tanks tossed out from the C-130s in Iraq with parachutes? Most of those seem to land just fine.. and it should be easier on Mars..
RPCs are inherently insecure and introduces a balancing act of keeping the algorithms secure while keeping an eye on inputs and making sure nothing gets memory-leaked.
All this overhead also will take resources. So whats is it exactly youre working on that needs RPCs? Most networked applications Ive seen doesnt need RPCs, especially ones that are secure and efficient.
...is chipping your teeth on small ceramic chips while enjoying a steak.
I wonder if you can attach quad monitors, quad mice and keyboards, and have a lanparty on once CPU. I know the radeon 9800 can go that far and already does miltiple monitors, I know of X projects to use multiple USB mice simultaneously and possibly multiple USB keyboards too.
hmmmmmmmmmm`
DAMN those teachers taught us Farsi the wrong way... right to left.
Now I have to take corrective training.
"I've seen companies exhibit that same mentality, and I've never been able to understand it"
I hear ya. But a company is not just a collection of people. MBA courses cost so much for a reason... because theres a whole social legal and financial mechanism to companies, and really no one person's opinion matters 100%, not even the president's. Everyone below him is more afraid of making an obvious silly mistake than bringing a weak expensive solution. I've seen at least one place where all the bosses knew Linux well but had to use Win2000 for the sake of investors. I wouldnt be surprised if 60% of the investors knew Linux is backed by IBM and is more secure than Windows, but they have other measurements of the appropriateness of an Operating System.
I install and configure Windows2000 and XP day in and day out on dozens of machines, but you know, when I have a computer with no NIC drivers... I boot in Knoppix to fetch them online. The company has an OpenBSD firewall, two other Linux servers and even an ancient SCO UNIX box to control a machine. We desperately need a large Linux company to send men in ties and good promises to man our meetings and give us a ticket to openly use the OS that we're using under the sheets.
When our firewall got hacked and I was reimplementing it in Linux or OpenBSD, I was constantly being asked, what is Linux, how much does it cost?
I used to tell em its free but they'd give me the look that Ive fallen for a nigerian scammer or havent read between the lines, or stealing software.
Nothing in life comes free... I got that twice as I was setting up the firewall. They also needed a big company behind the software regardless of my opinion of its stability. IT experts around the globe understand and respect opensource operaring systems, but companies as a whole cant put their trust into Linux. Microsoft is a face. It has an address and everyone knows that address. There are phone numbers to call and people to threaten should things break. You cannot call a kid in a garage and threaten him.
So companies like RedHat leaving out desktop users and focusing on business are doing Linux a favor. They're doing IT technicians in those companies a favor by allowing them to use what they trust in most. Once you have every institution use a Linux or BSD server as a redundant firewall or file server... other applications for it will spring up, and that tide, Microsoft cant go against.
Everything else is on magnetic or optical media that doesnt have much life anyway. The fax produces hard copies which are fast becoming a commodity.
Now the farmers will only have to deal with thundering herds of giant horny female elephants.
Take a hint. Voice recognition has been vaporware since the 60s. Every futuristic movie shows a pretty lady talking to her house turning on lights and making coffee. We've got way too much CPU power in hour houses for that, so wheres voice recognition?
The truth is, we dont need it. As impressive as voice recognition sounds, its application is limited to archival and military use.
Next you'll say NVIDIA and AMD will design their systems around Duke Nukem Forever.
I know many posts here talk of computers older than this, but I think the Commodore had pretty advanced graphics and a large library of nice games along with being a computer that you could open programs in and PEEK in the code.
,8,1 run..
That was my first computer. I think it took me almost a week to figure out how to run the first game.... what was it... load prog.run
It really gave me a head start into BASIC, but I was pretty jealous of a friend later with a 8088 XT, who could run GWBASIC and draw circles, while I was busy building tables of peeks and pokes.
I've never been a real fan of cutting edge computers. If I had the money to buy an Athlon64, 1GB ram, 260GB SATA disk, Radeon 9800XT.... I'll spend it on an RS/6000 40P and an AS/400 system. I recently had a blast learning the very weird OpenVMS on a miniVAX I obtained from a company. Wish I had the hardware to run MULTICS.
What is a book?
Pretty senseless to say gathering scientists in one spot increases their contribution to pollution. They would pollute in their respective cities anyway if they didnt travel.
Its fine to invest in gathering scientists despite their pollution for the purpose of deciding how to reduce pollution. Their solutions might be implemented on a global scale to reduce pollution on a much wider scale.
Better yet invite all scientists to arrive in San Francisco on bycicles. All those scientists losing weight will also fit more of them in the meeting room.
I used to have a pile of joysticks and pads during the days of Atari 2600 and the Commodore64. We used to break them, open them and fix em, then break them again, then buy a new one...
Gaming has changed enormously since. Quake2, half-life etc need the keyboard and mouse for a full-level of control (I prefer a trackball to the mouse), which cant be had with a gamepad. strategic games too cant be really played without all the keyboard buttons like Warcraft III. Games that were ported to consoles without a keyboard like duke nukem and counterstrike lost out for the lack of such precise controls there, and playstation 2 made good headway by introducing a keyboard and mouse.
Just as flightsims have died on the PC just because not many people have joysticks and flying an F16 is tough with the keyboard and not much fun, joysticks and gamepads are losing out in the market because most games require the precise control of a mouse and many keys. Gamepads are still really useful for older games through mame etc, for the games that were designed for joysticks, but not everyone plays those.
One thing to explore is kgens for windows which allows sega genesis games to be played across the Internet or a LAN, multiplayer.
I've never gotten the very rationale for all the work being done on Mozilla. I can understand a good standards-compliant and full-featured browser, but on one hand, Opera does a great job if you dont care about opensource like 99% of the users, and the rest simply use the IE that come with their OSes. Mozilla as many people have admitted is over-featured, but Firebird is not seeing much action in development either.
So I think Mozilla is a bit of a developer challenge to see how many ports it can run on... but quite honestly, even most opensource users dont really use mozilla. Konquerer, and even the older netscape communicator do a reasonable job for most webpages without needing a fat CPU. I tried hard to run Mozilla on my Sun Ultra 5 with 128mb RAM and Solaris 9, but had to settle on opera for performance reasons.
So can someone who has been using Mozilla for along time explain the reason for all this work on Mozilla? Is it for some practical or business purpose like Samba, Apache, X, gaim, or is it attracting developers for other reasons?
I recently replaced all model M keyboards at home (4 systems) to the newer IBM keyboards that come with netvistas. I was browsing around and found my favorite changed from the old model Ms to the newer IBMs and a few dell keyboards. The newer ones are nice and quite, but the problem stays. To find a truly good keyboard that is also quite is next to impossible. Ive seen the really quite types but I couldnt use them... the keys dont seem to bounce back so easily. Some of them had crappy plastic and was completely unusable.
This thread along with the previous silent mouse is pretty important to me. Beside bothering the crowd around, I feel model M types also bother me as I work. You can concentrate more on your work in complete silence.
Those icky people eat snakes and cats, and it were the poor kittens in cages where SARS started out from. AIDS too started in Africa from some kind of sexual contact with Chimps.
Like all diseases, SARS too must have come from people very different from us because they're barbaric/savages/weird/icky. We're too clean to spawn diseases although due to sheer bad luck we were hit bad.
We should begin with banning all flights from China and Hong Kong. THAT oughtta fix it.
Sometimes a letter might not reach its destination if its left open. Close the letter, SCO probably has enough of a company left there to have a letter-opener.
It will probably be released after the next superman series, and after the last episode of Santa Barbera.
An overwhelming number of programmers, software and web developers I know went "yeah I know Java". They dont really have a clue about real structured programming as in the Linux kernel, almost never heard of code optimisations and look great in a tie.
Universities are churning out students of ADA, Pascal and Java, most of whom applied to the university thinking of the good fortunes of being in IT around 1998.
I doubt many of the developers of the applications in sourceforge will be in this number. A market booms, you get hundereds of thousands of extra golddiggers, then it goes bust, the golddiggers leave, the ones dedicated to the art stay, the market booms again, the golddiggers return, the experienced ones make good money and buy McLarens.
Fewer programmers mean a guy who can port Linux or NetBSD to a specialized ARM MCU will be more in demand, and will not get laid off like today. It by no means means the cults and culture that churn out the code for sourcecode will disappear.
is the technology ready for end users?
I really dont get that question. How can a technology be ready or not ready? It is being shipped and it apparently performs to specs. Like you said it challenges P4 in terms of value, which might answer that question.
A certain number of vendors are making motherboards for it. When you have one or possibly two companies making chipsets, you might have an issue, but with a large number of chipsets and drivers getting mature, you might have the right timing for it.
One other benefit of buying a product early in its selling cycle is that youll have a current product for a longer period of time. Buy a P4 when its really cheap, and youll have a new chip from Intel in the next 6 months.
I am curious about your applications though. What is it for which a P4 2.4GHz doesnt suffice? My P3 550 is giving me good service through games, video and 3d model editing...
I went from Sympatico to Rogers to Sympatico and now looking elsewhere here in Toronto. About 4 years ago, they were offering the same speed at the same cost with no limits. Naturally bandwidth costs fall over time but theyve frozen between the two monopolists in Ontario.
Whats funny they quitely implemented bandwidth limits that are pretty rediculous, and Sympatico has even blocked port 25. In another incident when I was trying to explain network problems to a customerservice rep at Sympatico, I kept switching between win98 and linux to exhaust all their over-the-phone tests so they know the problem is on their side. Well, when he heard "Linux" he went bonkers and told me there was no way he is helping me with any further issues and I shouldnt waste his time.
So now we're paying an average of $65 per month for our usage, which does not support Linux, let alone the openvmx, solaris and openbsd that I have at home.
Here in winter, we've shut down our rack fans, turned off ACs and are looking at ways to make ourselves warmer. We could use some aussi machines to help in this time of need. Canada has enough electricity to export
In our company, we have tonnes of old Pentium1 machines and copies of windows95/98 and NT4. Many have been donated to schools but still more are piled in our cabinets, so we decided to use them as Terminal Service clients at various locations on the factory floor. With WindowsNT, it becomes stable and secure enough not to need constant maintenance.
At home, I have two Pentium1s with old 14" monitors and Windows95. The OS runs well with 32-64MB ram and many nice old games some of which require DOS interrupts, others that access the framebuffer and soundblaster buffers directly, work very well. I have yet to find ways to run those old nice games on Windows2000 or XP.
The newer computers that we're buying nowadays are shipped with Windows2000. We do not prefer XP and will certainly avoid the upcoming 2003. As the older computers with Windows2000 will become obsolete, we'll use their licenses on newer workstations with Pentium4 2.2GHZ and 512mb ram, should work nicely.
I just dont like what Microsoft did with XP onwards. They tried to make the OS smart on its own and guess network configurations, which becomes a nightmare for net admins. We'll eventually move to XP, after the next OS after 2003 ships. Till then we'll try our best to keep the Windows2000 copies around, while using Windows95 with Terminal Services where it works for us.