Basically, pricewise it does not make much of a difference if you have T-Net+DSL (T-Net = analog) or T-ISDN+DSL.
Check out this web page for prices:
http://www1.t-versand.de/intershoproot/eCS/TVers an d/en/images/rd/special/T-DSL_Preisuebersicht/start.html','width=750,height=645,toolbar=no,menubar=no,scrollbars=no,resizeable=no,status=no,location=no '
Hope this link works, otherwise try www.t-dsl.de, click on "DSL Preisübersicht".
When I was in New Jersey in Winter 2000/2001, I used WorldXchange.
They have great rates, I paid 8 cents per minute, but that was then.
Basically I used mysimon.com to find the cheapeast carrier in my area.
I know from a friend in CA who pays 5cents to Germany.
Note that that it is usually a different rate calling a landline than it is calling a cell phone.
Some carriers still have old agreements, where they are charged the same (which was the case back then with WorldXChange (worldxchange.com), but more and more you now have to pay around 20 for a call to a German cell phone.
When you get a phone, get at from the Deutsche Telekom and not from any other local carrier. Why? Their rates might suck, but only if you use Deutsche Telekom can you use ALL call by call carriers which are billed by the normal telephone bill. The majority you can use without registering at the other phone company, so basically you check out which operator is the cheapest for a call, pick up the phone, and dial.
Calls to the US start at 4 cents per minute using Call by Call.
To check the cheapest rate and which call by caller operator to use, checkout www.teltarif.de
ISDN phone lines are very popular over here, you can get a special rate that calls on Sunday are free within Germany. These can also be used to call up an internet provider with "normal" telephone number. www.teltarif.de also has a list of these which you can use together with usernames/password.
Local phone calls are NOT free.
Internet dialup you also usually use call by call ones. Check out www.billiger-surfen.de to find out which operator is cheapest. Cheap ones start like 1 cent per minute. That's about the best rate you can get.
Flatrates for internet dialups do not exist.
Broadband:
DSL is the way to go, you need to get the DSL line from the Deutsche Telekom. And in addition to that, you must subscribe to an Online service, either the Deutsche Telekom's own (T-Online) where a 768kbit down/128kbit up costs 29.99 Euros per month with no limit regarding time or bandwidth. Note that this flatrate is not available if you use the 1500up/192kdown service. 1und1 (www.1und1.de) has better deals if you have less traffic.
Basically, for an ISDN telephone with the calls free on Sunday plus DSL 768Kbit, you would pay 41.27 Euros a month. Add to that the online rate (29,99 for t-online dsl flat)
If you sign up at 1und1.de you get a free USB DSL Modem, for 9.95 you get an ISDN telephone switch to which you can connect analogue phones to, and they pass on your request to the Deutsche Telekom. You also have to pay a setup fee, which is charged by the Deutsche Telekom, but doing it with 1und1 currently offers the best deal.
IPv6 may have a 128 bit address. BUT(!) you can't really calculate it like that.
For example, I have a whole/48 net for my home and anyone that wants one can have one for free at many tunnel brokers.
A/48 net includes the ability to have 64K subnets which all can contain 2^64 hosts. Note that as a DEFAULT(!) (and only as a default) the Mac address of the interface is used as the host portion of the address. BUT, for my PCs I have an additional:1 for my main router,:2,:3,:4... for my clients.
I even have DNS for my IPv6 net. The whole thing is tunneled through my linux router, which is actually on a dynamic IPv4 link (what I mean is I get a new Ipv4 address every 24 hours or at every new dialin), and the cool thing is, that from outside I can access all my clients using the (static) IPv6 addresses. And I just use the normal DNS name, DNS is hosted at zoneedit.com, which allow 5 free zones, and they also let you use AAAA records.
I actually wrote a thesis about using IntServe/Diffserve for a video conferencing application across the internet. It is a while ago now and I have had other things on my mind, but basically what I found out is that on the internet there is no real need for QOS as bandwidth is increasing all the time, satellite links are reolaces by fiber (less latency and delay, and a lot more bandwidth), fiber is being replaced by "thicker" fibers, etc. Just to give you an idea of the amount of bandwidth available - only 2.9% of all fiber optic cables layed alongside powerlines, rail roads etc are actually lit. And those that are lit, thos in use for the internet only have a maximum use basically of 50%. Also, in order to give certain datastreams priorities over others, you need to track these, which adds processing delays and with networks where bandwidth is not a problem - why do this?
Also, something often overlooked: In order to actually give packets priority over others and shape the traffic depending on priotities, you need to queue at least 200 packets it was discovered by some researchers, otherwise the queuing algorithms just do not have enough data to actually put into different queues. Think of it this way, if the queues are empty, then of course the data is sent to the top priority queue and you gain nothing.
Basically, there are two concepts: Diffserve and Intserve.
Intserve goes against the nature of the internet (in my opinion), as it uses RSVP to set up a quasi-static route through the internet, does the reservations, and then the flows have to be monitored. Keeping track of individual flows on the backbone routers? No way! And if the route changes, all the reservations have to be done again. Intserve (IPv6 has a Flow Label to facilitate this) has no place on the internet backbone in my opinion. Intserve is very useful though in an organisation, where you have control of the network, and to give certain flows priorities getting out of that bottleneck router to the internet and then let best effort scheduling do it's work.
DiffServe on the other hand is viable in my opinion as this is hop per hop based. Diffserve works by marking packets and assigning it a traffic class. This is very useful when you have flatrate customers, and customers that have are willing to pay for bandwidth. Of course the routers could and may already mark traffic of those customers paying for bandwidth with a higher priority.
Something which I really like about Diffserve is the ability to give packets a drop priority ("Hello you little nice router, If you really need to drop a packet, please drop this one"). This could be very useful in the case of video over the internet where the network itself regulates the quality of the video. What I proposed in my thesis, was to have an algorithm that send the most important coefficients in a packet with a low drop priority, the next batch with a medium priority and the rest with a high one, and in addition to that also have the software on the other end report back some statistics so sending is also reduced. What this is allows is to have video not stop, but just instantly become of less quality if there are congestions. Speaking of congestions, they only exist till the packets they reach the backbone. And of course getting down from them again.
What has my post got to do with IPv6? Well, IPv6 has a Flow Label and Traffic Class in the IP header which are for IntServe/DiffServe. Ipv6 facilitates IntServe/Diffserve, but does not really add anything new in this respect. It just makes it easier to process, because it is always at the same place whereas this info in an IPv4 packet could be at varying locations due to the variable length of an IPv4 header.
Optical, wireless, came with a recharging stand, had a "Medion" name printed on it but looks just like the logitec.
The article says the logitech comes with NiCd batteries, well, mine came with 2 AAA 700mAh NiMH batteries.
I love it!
I don't use the recharging stand though because it says in the instructions to leave it in there for 8 hours. Instead I put it in my microprocessor controlled NiMH charger which I actually bought for my digital camera.
A good female friend of mine in the US has a son who could read when he was just a little over 2. Yesterday I had to explain to him on the phone how a DC motor works, because he wanted to connect the 110V mains (he lives in the US) to his toy rocket and I tried to explain to him that it is damn dangerous and wouldn't do a bit of good given that it is AC and not DC and that the motor just wasn't designed for such high fields even if it were DC. He is so damn clever, can already do simple math, but he really needs to be able to solve equasions, derive functions and stuff because of the stuff he is interested in (how high will the rocket go, how can I make it go up faster). I am a Master of Electrical Enginering so I have quite a good knowledge about Mathematics in general and also higher math. But how do you go about teaching a child that? I can also only help so much because I live in Germany (still) and my friend in the US. What can I recommend him to read so it is not too boring and understandable at the same time? What can I do just using a phone and an instant messenger? Children's physics books are way too simple for him, adult physics books require way too much mathematical knowledge. Feel free to email me at germanbirdmanATchaospowerDOTde
So a few of us have got together to try and make it not suck in an unofficial project.
We have all just started, all new to the code, but if you'd like to help, drop by at www DOT fastcheck DOT org. Not a real URL here to not slashdot the server. There is nothing to download, it just contains a forum.
Shooting clubs are very popular in Germany, especially in small villages. You do need a license. To get one you need to take many exams, have a good police record etc.
It is true, that the weapons need to be locked away (seperate from ammunition) and are not allowed to be taken with you on the street or so in public.
Weapons of sport (under which the pump gun and the other gun which he had fell) are legal (if you are licensed) but are only allowed to be used on the shooting range in the shooting club.
Completely offtopic, nice effect though which I always ran on my ZX Spectrum 20 years ago:
for n=1 TO 80:CIRCLE n,n,n: NEXT n
going ontopic again, a circle just would be too slow to draw without the BRESENHAM algorithm for slow processors.
Mathematics are also very important. Think taylor rows (correct translation? "Taylorreihen"). Without it we wouldn't have many of the mathematical functions.
But before you even use taylor, you need to have efficient multiplication and division algorithms for floating point numbers.
I grew up in the UK and also went to school there till I was 13, after that I went to school in Germany.
I know quite a few people that learnt English from Star Trek: TNG. Star Trek is actually good for learning English because the sentences are spoken slowly and clearly unlike in some other films or series.
The problem was that it is quite difficult in Germany to watch a series like Star Trek in English. Until this weekend it was legal to hack a satellite tv broadcasting station if that station did not sell subscribtions to your country.
So when I was still in school (9 years ago) we and a couple of my friends had a hacked smart card to receive the UK satellite TV stations. I know quite a few people that bought a decoder + hacked smart card just to watch ST:TNG and learn English.
Unfortuneately since Sky introduced their 0x0A smartcards Sky was never hacked again. This must be 7 or 8 years ago now.
Now DVDs have solved the problem of watching stuff in English. Every DVD (that was filmed in an ENglish speaking country) you can buy contains an English soundtrack. Some of these DVDs though force you to have German subtitles when watching the DVD with the ENglish soundtrack and you can't imagine how annoying it is seeing the film in one language and having subtitles in another. Luckily hacks exist for DVD players to remove user prohibitions.
The ENglish soundtrack is one of the major reasons why I buy so many DVDs because I am sick and tired of listening to the film in German. Sometimes you watch a movie and gain $$$ in the process: You order a DVD from DVD box office with free shipping, watch the movie and sell it again. SOmetimes movies can be sold for higher prices (used) than it cost to get the DVD new from DVD box office. I'll never understand why. This was especially true when ebay.de still allowed you to sell Region 1 DVDs.
Region codes are not a problem. Most DVD players are hackable or are already sold already hacked.
Cinemawise all films are in German, but some cinemas have one single screening of one film a week in the original language. Seldom though.
Having a film dubbed is better though than what some other countries do: Poland - here the film with the english track is audible - but very silent, but on top of this someone (a single person) is constantly translating what the people are saying. The difference in volume is so great that you cannot hear the background English when the translator is speaking. I don't understand Polish, but I think this is a very stupid way of doing things.
The Dutch, Danes and Swedish (probably over Scandinavien countries too) just show the movies in the original language and have subtitles. This is the reason why in the Netherlands everyone understands English and I mean everyone. In Germany, most people will understand you if you speak slowly because everybody learnt it at school sometime, but the older the people you are talking to and the less paid the profession, the less likely it is they understand you (and the lesser they get paid the less likely it is that they even speak German nowerdays). Depends on the job though, a programmer always understands English, so will any manager and the like.
Off topic: Since I'll maybe be moving to the US to work there at the end of the year, is it easy to get a DVD player that plays region 2 PAL DVDs on an NTSC TV? Region free of course? I don't want to throw away all my R2 DVDs.
Kamera support seems to be compiled in, from what the release notes say.
What about cdparanoia/lame and ogg bindings for the AudioCD IOSlave? That is something I miss dearly in the 7.2 KDE 2.2.2 (up2date) edition on my laptop. I try to keep my laptop pure redhat with no self compiles.
Compiling KDE 3 with the redhat gcc 2.96 takes AGES - I compiled KDE 3.0 beta 2 a week before the release candidate appeared. Took me a whole week to compile it on the machine I tried it on (an old PII 266 I wasn't using) - that is one or two KDE packages per day, usually starting the compile before going to work, sometimes before going to sleep. That's why I'm interested in how their KDE 3 was compiled.
Our ID cards also contain similar information. While they do not have a magnetic strip on them, the ID card numer is done in an OCRable font.
The only readers I have ever seen that are used to swipe it are when you leave the EU at airports. The EU, not on domestic flights within the EU, you have to fly to some non-EU country.
Our national IDs are also used if you want to get into a night club or somjething, but they are visually inspected by a human being.
I am not sure about our new drivers licenses since I still have an old paper one and not plastic.
We will get new IDs soon because of 9/11 - they will contain some sort of biometric information, either a fingerprint or geometry of the hand or something like that. Presumably these will also be in some machine readable format.
Since we Germans are (rightfully) paranoid about data privacy, many many laws exist to protect data privacy ("Datenschutz") I guess the name will not come up in the machine readable format, but that's only a guess.
I always used to think that they are overparanoid. A lot of public offices would work a lot better if they would connect up their servers, but it isn't done because of the strict data privacy laws. I am becoming really glad that we are so paranoid.
We even have a "Bundesbeauftragten für den Datenschutz" (Federal Commissioner for data privacy) (or data protection which is a more acurate translation).
To see how paranoid we are, type in the word "Datenschutz" in Google. Approx 1 million 200 thousand pages found is the result. Now search for "Data privacy" (in quotes). My search came up with 200 thousand.
I have a US SSN and US Driving license. I lived there for 5 months last year. While my Driving License was never scanned, I did find it shocking at how many places I was asked for my Social Security number.
If you want to do anything with IPv6, you NEED BSD
on
NetBSD 1.5ZB
·
· Score: 1
I'm talking about SERIOUS stuff like IPv6 multicast routing, Alternative queuing etc. True, you need the KAME patch, but at least it is there.
Linux (even with USAGI patches) doesn't even do IPv6 multicast routing.
There is even a project on Sourceforge for Netbsd to support XCAST(+), which is the main reason why I am using netbsd as the router OS for my thesis project.
(Xcast is a method of multicasting a packet to a FEW destinations, unlike standard multicasting using multicast trees with rendez-vous points which can flood whole networks)
I love linux, and when you know linux moving to Netbsd can sometimes be a little awkward. Linux is just so much more userfriendly.
There are legitimate uses for it. I may want to have the same hostname for a variety of different services, but put those services on different machines behind the firewall.
The people standard kernel support for IPv6 sucks. But thank god there are the people at USAGI that are working on an IPv6 implementation for Linux that doesn't suck, and it works rather well.
Just check out the linux ipv6 howto or go to http://www.linux-ipv6.org to the USAGI site and check out the differences between the standard kernel and the USAGI patched kernel.
Please note though that while the USAGI people are doing a great job, the IPv6 even with USAGI patches is nowhere near as complete as any BSD with the KAME patch (Multicast routing is totally missing for one thing).
For an OS with the most complete IPv6 support currently available, check out NetBSD with the KAME patch. You can download ISOs with the KAME patch already on it. Just go to the netbsd home page at http://www.netbsd.org
Actually, QoS and reserving bandwith actually has not got that much to do with IPv4 or IPv6.
Ipv6 facilitates QoS because it has a flow field in the header which should be used in an IntServe architecture.
It has another field that at some point should facilite a DiffServe architecture.
By the way - Intserve is where an application requests bandwidth reservation in some sort- Diffserve, it is done transparantly - the applications don't need to do a thing, but this means all traffic from a host is handled with priority. Basically "Diff-Serve" is a better best-effort service which works on the principle of service level agreements - I think will be the future of the internet. Flat fee payers will get best effort whereas people paying for bandwidth will get higher priority. I also forsee some way in which a SLA can be upgraded temporarily - this is already happening today with some satellite DSL providers.
The actual bandwidth reservation or SLA negotiation and the then needed traffic shaping have nothing whatsoever to do with IPv6, it works just as well with IPv4 - Ipv6 just makes it a LITTLE bit easier.
By the way, it is not defined anywhere yet on how the flow field is to be actually used.
Actually, it doesn't really make that much difference.
An IPv4 header is actually quite difficult to process for hardware routers because it can have a length of anywhere between 20 and 60 bytes.
An IPv6 header on the other hand consists of a main header with a fixed length of 40 bytes and possible extension headers which do not need to be processed on all systems. The 40 bytes of the IPv6 main header includes the 128 bit source and destination addresses.
The IPv6 headers are actually quite efficient and are designed in such a way that they can be easily processed by hardware.
So no, there will not be a BIG increase in bandwidth because of the headers.
Don't forget it is a -pre. Marcelo was keeping a lot of patches out of the late 18-pres because he wanted to get the damn thing stable.
We should also note the time that has gone past between 2.4.17 and 2.4.18 - more than two whole months. This is Marcelo's first real own kernel in my opinion. 2.4.16 was a bug fix for 2.4.15 - 2.4.17 came out only a few weeks afterwards, but this baby really had time to mature.
This is also why I don't mind reading this (commenting on all the "This is not freshmeat" discussions) on slashdot. This is a stable kernel, the first for a long time. It is not like in the times when a new "stable" kernel came out like every other day and people got annoyed.
I have 2.4.18-rc4 running for almost 9 hours now (basically since it came out) with setiathome, dnetc, tftpd, nfs, smbd, cups, pppoe, bind9, dhcpd3, tftpd (for remote booting clients) using huge reiserfs partitions and I like what I see. It is just my busybox DSL router, firewall and file server, so not really a production system, but it is in a server case, running a dual pentium II so hardware that while not fully up to date resembles that of production servers in medium sized companies. I don't normally pull a new kernel everytime one comes out, but I suddenly needed NFS support which I didn't have compiled in before, so I decided to upgrade to either.18 or the most current release candidate. Before that it was running for at least a month on.17.
Slashdot Mirror
Basically, pricewise it does not make much of a difference if you have T-Net+DSL (T-Net = analog) or T-ISDN+DSL.
s an d/en/images/rd/special/T-DSL_Preisuebersicht/start .html','width=750,height=645,toolbar=no,menubar=no ,scrollbars=no,resizeable=no,status=no,location=no '
Check out this web page for prices:
http://www1.t-versand.de/intershoproot/eCS/TVer
Hope this link works, otherwise try www.t-dsl.de, click on "DSL Preisübersicht".
Cheapest T-Net+DSL rate = 33.71
Cheapest T-ISDN+DSL rate = 36.98
For 3 Euros more that means that you get all the coolness of having 2 phone lines instead of one.
It is true that the German Telekom sometimes takes 3 attempts to get things right :-(
:-(
Old former monopolist.
But in 90% of Germany, you simply have no other choice
And they are getting a lot better.
When I was in New Jersey in Winter 2000/2001, I used WorldXchange.
They have great rates, I paid 8 cents per minute, but that was then.
Basically I used mysimon.com to find the cheapeast carrier in my area.
I know from a friend in CA who pays 5cents to Germany.
Note that that it is usually a different rate calling a landline than it is calling a cell phone.
Some carriers still have old agreements, where they are charged the same (which was the case back then with WorldXChange (worldxchange.com), but more and more you now have to pay around 20 for a call to a German cell phone.
Many are complaining that ping times are bad in the telekom DSL network, that is because they do not use fastpath.
But downloads are pretty speedy. Mostly you do get to download at 80K/second which I think is quite nice.
Ping time to a cable modem in PA in the US from my German DSL connection is about 140ms.
2.9 cents/minute cheapest carrier to the USA currently.
Prices change all the time.
OK,
When you get a phone, get at from the Deutsche Telekom and not from any other local carrier.
Why? Their rates might suck, but only if you use Deutsche Telekom can you use ALL call by call carriers which are billed by the normal telephone bill. The majority you can use without registering at the other phone company, so basically you check out which operator is the cheapest for a call, pick up the phone, and dial.
Calls to the US start at 4 cents per minute using Call by Call.
To check the cheapest rate and which call by caller operator to use, checkout www.teltarif.de
ISDN phone lines are very popular over here, you can get a special rate that calls on Sunday are free within Germany. These can also be used to call up an internet provider with "normal" telephone number. www.teltarif.de also has a list of these which you can use together with usernames/password.
Local phone calls are NOT free.
Internet dialup you also usually use call by call ones. Check out www.billiger-surfen.de to find out which operator is cheapest. Cheap ones start like 1 cent per minute. That's about the best rate you can get.
Flatrates for internet dialups do not exist.
Broadband:
DSL is the way to go, you need to get the DSL line from the Deutsche Telekom. And in addition to that, you must subscribe to an Online service, either the Deutsche Telekom's own (T-Online) where a 768kbit down/128kbit up costs 29.99 Euros per month with no limit regarding time or bandwidth. Note that this flatrate is not available if you use the 1500up/192kdown service. 1und1 (www.1und1.de) has better deals if you have less traffic.
Basically, for an ISDN telephone with the calls free on Sunday plus DSL 768Kbit, you would pay 41.27 Euros a month. Add to that the online rate (29,99 for t-online dsl flat)
If you sign up at 1und1.de you get a free USB DSL Modem, for 9.95 you get an ISDN telephone switch to which you can connect analogue phones to, and they pass on your request to the Deutsche Telekom. You also have to pay a setup fee, which is charged by the Deutsche Telekom, but doing it with 1und1 currently offers the best deal.
Hope this helps.
IPv6 may have a 128 bit address. BUT(!) you can't really calculate it like that.
/48 net for my home and anyone that wants one can have one for free at many tunnel brokers.
/48 net includes the ability to have 64K subnets which all can contain 2^64 hosts. Note that as a DEFAULT(!) (and only as a default) the Mac address of the interface is used as the host portion of the address. BUT, for my PCs I have an additional :1 for my main router, :2, :3, :4 ... for my clients.
For example, I have a whole
A
I even have DNS for my IPv6 net. The whole thing is tunneled through my linux router, which is actually on a dynamic IPv4 link (what I mean is I get a new Ipv4 address every 24 hours or at every new dialin), and the cool thing is, that from outside I can access all my clients using the (static) IPv6 addresses. And I just use the normal DNS name, DNS is hosted at zoneedit.com, which allow 5 free zones, and they also let you use AAAA records.
I actually wrote a thesis about using IntServe/Diffserve for a video conferencing application across the internet.
It is a while ago now and I have had other things on my mind, but basically what I found out is that on the internet there is no real need for QOS as bandwidth is increasing all the time, satellite links are reolaces by fiber (less latency and delay, and a lot more bandwidth), fiber is being replaced by "thicker" fibers, etc.
Just to give you an idea of the amount of bandwidth available - only 2.9% of all fiber optic cables layed alongside powerlines, rail roads etc are actually lit. And those that are lit, thos in use for the internet only have a maximum use basically of 50%.
Also, in order to give certain datastreams priorities over others, you need to track these, which adds processing delays and with networks where bandwidth is not a problem - why do this?
Also, something often overlooked:
In order to actually give packets priority over others and shape the traffic depending on priotities, you need to queue at least 200 packets it was discovered by some researchers, otherwise the queuing algorithms just do not have enough data to actually put into different queues. Think of it this way, if the queues are empty, then of course the data is sent to the top priority queue and you gain nothing.
Basically, there are two concepts: Diffserve and Intserve.
Intserve goes against the nature of the internet (in my opinion), as it uses RSVP to set up a quasi-static route through the internet, does the reservations, and then the flows have to be monitored. Keeping track of individual flows on the backbone routers? No way! And if the route changes, all the reservations have to be done again. Intserve (IPv6 has a Flow Label to facilitate this) has no place on the internet backbone in my opinion.
Intserve is very useful though in an organisation, where you have control of the network, and to give certain flows priorities getting out of that bottleneck router to the internet and then let best effort scheduling do it's work.
DiffServe on the other hand is viable in my opinion as this is hop per hop based. Diffserve works by marking packets and assigning it a traffic class.
This is very useful when you have flatrate customers, and customers that have are willing to pay for bandwidth. Of course the routers could and may already mark traffic of those customers paying for bandwidth with a higher priority.
Something which I really like about Diffserve is the ability to give packets a drop priority ("Hello you little nice router, If you really need to drop a packet, please drop this one").
This could be very useful in the case of video over the internet where the network itself regulates the quality of the video. What I proposed in my thesis, was to have an algorithm that send the most important coefficients in a packet with a low drop priority, the next batch with a medium priority and the rest with a high one, and in addition to that also have the software on the other end report back some statistics so sending is also reduced.
What this is allows is to have video not stop, but just instantly become of less quality if there are congestions.
Speaking of congestions, they only exist till the packets they reach the backbone.
And of course getting down from them again.
What has my post got to do with IPv6? Well, IPv6 has a Flow Label and Traffic Class in the IP header which are for IntServe/DiffServe.
Ipv6 facilitates IntServe/Diffserve, but does not really add anything new in this respect. It just makes it easier to process, because it is always at the same place whereas this info in an IPv4 packet could be at varying locations due to the variable length of an IPv4 header.
..about 3 weeks ago.
Optical, wireless, came with a recharging stand, had a "Medion" name printed on it but looks just like the logitec.
The article says the logitech comes with NiCd batteries, well, mine came with 2 AAA 700mAh NiMH batteries.
I love it!
I don't use the recharging stand though because it says in the instructions to leave it in there for 8 hours. Instead I put it in my microprocessor controlled NiMH charger which I actually bought for my digital camera.
Aldi is also a food store.
A good female friend of mine in the US has a son who could read when he was just a little over 2. Yesterday I had to explain to him on the phone how a DC motor works, because he wanted to connect the 110V mains (he lives in the US) to his toy rocket and I tried to explain to him that it is damn dangerous and wouldn't do a bit of good given that it is AC and not DC and that the motor just wasn't designed for such high fields even if it were DC.
He is so damn clever, can already do simple math, but he really needs to be able to solve equasions, derive functions and stuff because of the stuff he is interested in (how high will the rocket go, how can I make it go up faster).
I am a Master of Electrical Enginering so I have quite a good knowledge about Mathematics in general and also higher math. But how do you go about teaching a child that? I can also only help so much because I live in Germany (still) and my friend in the US. What can I recommend him to read so it is not too boring and understandable at the same time?
What can I do just using a phone and an instant messenger?
Children's physics books are way too simple for him, adult physics books require way too much mathematical knowledge.
Feel free to email me at germanbirdmanATchaospowerDOTde
So a few of us have got together to try and make it not suck in an unofficial project.
We have all just started, all new to the code, but if you'd like to help, drop by at www DOT fastcheck DOT org. Not a real URL here to not slashdot the server.
There is nothing to download, it just contains a forum.
He *did* own the guns legally.
Shooting clubs are very popular in Germany, especially in small villages. You do need a license. To get one you need to take many exams, have a good police record etc.
It is true, that the weapons need to be locked away (seperate from ammunition) and are not allowed to be taken with you on the street or so in public.
Weapons of sport (under which the pump gun and the other gun which he had fell) are legal (if you are licensed) but are only allowed to be used on the shooting range in the shooting club.
Completely offtopic, nice effect though which I always ran on my ZX Spectrum 20 years ago:
for n=1 TO 80:CIRCLE n,n,n: NEXT n
going ontopic again, a circle just would be too slow to draw without the BRESENHAM algorithm for slow processors.
Mathematics are also very important. Think taylor rows (correct translation? "Taylorreihen"). Without it we wouldn't have many of the mathematical functions.
But before you even use taylor, you need to have efficient multiplication and division algorithms for floating point numbers.
I grew up in the UK and also went to school there till I was 13, after that I went to school in Germany.
I know quite a few people that learnt English from Star Trek: TNG. Star Trek is actually good for learning English because the sentences are spoken slowly and clearly unlike in some other films or series.
The problem was that it is quite difficult in Germany to watch a series like Star Trek in English. Until this weekend it was legal to hack a satellite tv broadcasting station if that station did not sell subscribtions to your country.
So when I was still in school (9 years ago) we and a couple of my friends had a hacked smart card to receive the UK satellite TV stations. I know quite a few people that bought a decoder + hacked smart card just to watch ST:TNG and learn English.
Unfortuneately since Sky introduced their 0x0A smartcards Sky was never hacked again. This must be 7 or 8 years ago now.
Now DVDs have solved the problem of watching stuff in English. Every DVD (that was filmed in an ENglish speaking country) you can buy contains an English soundtrack. Some of these DVDs though force you to have German subtitles when watching the DVD with the ENglish soundtrack and you can't imagine how annoying it is seeing the film in one language and having subtitles in another. Luckily hacks exist for DVD players to remove user prohibitions.
The ENglish soundtrack is one of the major reasons why I buy so many DVDs because I am sick and tired of listening to the film in German. Sometimes you watch a movie and gain $$$ in the process: You order a DVD from DVD box office with free shipping, watch the movie and sell it again. SOmetimes movies can be sold for higher prices (used) than it cost to get the DVD new from DVD box office. I'll never understand why. This was especially true when ebay.de still allowed you to sell Region 1 DVDs.
Region codes are not a problem. Most DVD players are hackable or are already sold already hacked.
Cinemawise all films are in German, but some cinemas have one single screening of one film a week in the original language. Seldom though.
Having a film dubbed is better though than what some other countries do: Poland - here the film with the english track is audible - but very silent, but on top of this someone (a single person) is constantly translating what the people are saying. The difference in volume is so great that you cannot hear the background English when the translator is speaking. I don't understand Polish, but I think this is a very stupid way of doing things.
The Dutch, Danes and Swedish (probably over Scandinavien countries too) just show the movies in the original language and have subtitles. This is the reason why in the Netherlands everyone understands English and I mean everyone. In Germany, most people will understand you if you speak slowly because everybody learnt it at school sometime, but the older the people you are talking to and the less paid the profession, the less likely it is they understand you (and the lesser they get paid the less likely it is that they even speak German nowerdays). Depends on the job though, a programmer always understands English, so will any manager and the like.
Off topic: Since I'll maybe be moving to the US to work there at the end of the year, is it easy to get a DVD player that plays region 2 PAL DVDs on an NTSC TV? Region free of course? I don't want to throw away all my R2 DVDs.
Actually, how do they receive this stuff at this speed?
What type of electronics run at terabit/second speeds?
Anybody know?
Support for Cups? I guess so now it is included.
Kamera support seems to be compiled in, from what the release notes say.
What about cdparanoia/lame and ogg bindings for the
AudioCD IOSlave? That is something I miss dearly in the 7.2 KDE 2.2.2 (up2date) edition on my laptop. I try to keep my laptop pure redhat with no self compiles.
Compiling KDE 3 with the redhat gcc 2.96 takes AGES - I compiled KDE 3.0 beta 2 a week before the release candidate appeared. Took me a whole week to compile it on the machine I tried it on (an old PII 266 I wasn't using) - that is one or two KDE packages per day, usually starting the compile before going to work, sometimes before going to sleep.
That's why I'm interested in how their KDE 3 was compiled.
All 7.x versions have it if you ran up2date. At least it's installed on my 2 redhat systems.
This scares me to death what I read here.
Our ID cards also contain similar information. While they do not have a magnetic strip on them, the ID card numer is done in an OCRable font.
The only readers I have ever seen that are used to swipe it are when you leave the EU at airports. The EU, not on domestic flights within the EU, you have to fly to some non-EU country.
Our national IDs are also used if you want to get into a night club or somjething, but they are visually inspected by a human being.
I am not sure about our new drivers licenses since I still have an old paper one and not plastic.
We will get new IDs soon because of 9/11 - they will contain some sort of biometric information, either a fingerprint or geometry of the hand or something like that. Presumably these will also be in some machine readable format.
Since we Germans are (rightfully) paranoid about data privacy, many many laws exist to protect data privacy ("Datenschutz") I guess the name will not come up in the machine readable format, but that's only a guess.
I always used to think that they are overparanoid. A lot of public offices would work a lot better if they would connect up their servers, but it isn't done because of the strict data privacy laws. I am becoming really glad that we are so paranoid.
We even have a "Bundesbeauftragten für den Datenschutz" (Federal Commissioner for data privacy) (or data protection which is a more acurate translation).
To see how paranoid we are, type in the word "Datenschutz" in Google. Approx 1 million 200 thousand pages found is the result.
Now search for "Data privacy" (in quotes). My search came up with 200 thousand.
I have a US SSN and US Driving license. I lived there for 5 months last year. While my Driving License was never scanned, I did find it shocking at how many places I was asked for my Social Security number.
I'm talking about SERIOUS stuff like IPv6 multicast routing, Alternative queuing etc. True, you need the KAME patch, but at least it is there.
Linux (even with USAGI patches) doesn't even do IPv6 multicast routing.
There is even a project on Sourceforge for Netbsd to support XCAST(+), which is the main reason why I am using netbsd as the router OS for my thesis project.
(Xcast is a method of multicasting a packet to a FEW destinations, unlike standard multicasting using multicast trees with rendez-vous points which can flood whole networks)
I love linux, and when you know linux moving to Netbsd can sometimes be a little awkward. Linux is just so much more userfriendly.
I don't need to explain the difference between local link, site local and global anymore.
But say you have a current NAT architecture (IPv4) that allows clients in the network access the outside and not the other way round.
That does pose an interesting question.
It could easily be done with an iptables firewall though, denying anybody to establish connections to your prefix.
I agree though that if the firewall is overcome, every host is easily identified and can route.
There are legitimate uses for it. I may want to have the same hostname for a variety of different services, but put those services on different machines behind the firewall.
That's what anycast addresses in Ipv6 are for.
The people standard kernel support for IPv6 sucks. But thank god there are the people at USAGI that are working on an IPv6 implementation for Linux that doesn't suck, and it works rather well.
Just check out the linux ipv6 howto or go to http://www.linux-ipv6.org to the USAGI site and check out the differences between the standard kernel and the USAGI patched kernel.
Please note though that while the USAGI people are doing a great job, the IPv6 even with USAGI patches is nowhere near as complete as any BSD with the KAME patch (Multicast routing is totally missing for one thing).
For an OS with the most complete IPv6 support currently available, check out NetBSD with the KAME patch. You can download ISOs with the KAME patch already on it. Just go to the netbsd home page at http://www.netbsd.org
Actually, QoS and reserving bandwith actually has not got that much to do with IPv4 or IPv6.
Ipv6 facilitates QoS because it has a flow field in the header which should be used in an IntServe architecture.
It has another field that at some point should facilite a DiffServe architecture.
By the way - Intserve is where an application requests bandwidth reservation in some sort- Diffserve, it is done transparantly - the applications don't need to do a thing, but this means all traffic from a host is handled with priority. Basically "Diff-Serve" is a better best-effort service which works on the principle of service level agreements - I think will be the future of the internet. Flat fee payers will get best effort whereas people paying for bandwidth will get higher priority. I also forsee some way in which a SLA can be upgraded temporarily - this is already happening today with some satellite DSL providers.
The actual bandwidth reservation or SLA negotiation and the then needed traffic shaping have nothing whatsoever to do with IPv6, it works just as well with IPv4 - Ipv6 just makes it a LITTLE bit easier.
By the way, it is not defined anywhere yet on how the flow field is to be actually used.
[Bandwidth used up by bigger headers]
Actually, it doesn't really make that much difference.
An IPv4 header is actually quite difficult to process for hardware routers because it can have a length of anywhere between 20 and 60 bytes.
An IPv6 header on the other hand consists of a main header with a fixed length of 40 bytes and possible extension headers which do not need to be processed on all systems.
The 40 bytes of the IPv6 main header includes the 128 bit source and destination addresses.
The IPv6 headers are actually quite efficient and are designed in such a way that they can be easily processed by hardware.
So no, there will not be a BIG increase in bandwidth because of the headers.
Don't forget it is a -pre. Marcelo was keeping a lot of patches out of the late 18-pres because he wanted to get the damn thing stable.
.18 or the most current release candidate. Before that it was running for at least a month on .17.
We should also note the time that has gone past between 2.4.17 and 2.4.18 - more than two whole months. This is Marcelo's first real own kernel in my opinion. 2.4.16 was a bug fix for 2.4.15 - 2.4.17 came out only a few weeks afterwards, but this baby really had time to mature.
This is also why I don't mind reading this (commenting on all the "This is not freshmeat" discussions) on slashdot. This is a stable kernel, the first for a long time. It is not like in the times when a new "stable" kernel came out like every other day and people got annoyed.
I have 2.4.18-rc4 running for almost 9 hours now (basically since it came out) with setiathome, dnetc, tftpd, nfs, smbd, cups, pppoe, bind9, dhcpd3, tftpd (for remote booting clients) using huge reiserfs partitions and I like what I see. It is just my busybox DSL router, firewall and file server, so not really a production system, but it is in a server case, running a dual pentium II so hardware that while not fully up to date resembles that of production servers in medium sized companies. I don't normally pull a new kernel everytime one comes out, but I suddenly needed NFS support which I didn't have compiled in before, so I decided to upgrade to either