Fortunately for me the distributor UniBrew makes the beer available here in S.O. Cal. at Wines of The World in Long Beach. Having Maudite available has greatly aided my adaptation to the land that has no snow and few good places to play hockey.
Wow. That only serves to increase my desire to live in the Los Angeles area. Hey, do they have "La Fin Du Monde" there?
No snow = positive. (But it's not a long flight to Colorado when I feel the need to ski.)
Few places to play hockey = no big deal to me.
Anyone interested in hiring a Canuck?
As for American beer, there are some good ones. Those that come to mind are: Pete's Wicked Ale, Sam Adams and Jerimiah Red which is available at a Pizza chain whose name escapes me.
Call me crazy (and you probably will), but I really like Gennessee.
Then again, I also love Moxie, though I'm sure that's really hard to get in L.A.
You'd die. Blood does a lot more than just that.
on
Blood Type: NULL
·
· Score: 4
Get a full transfusion, then when you get a cut, you'll bleed milky white, and everyone'll think you're a robot!
Sure. But you'd have problems before you got cut.
I'm sure that this stuff is meant to fill up your bloodstream to avert the most immediate causes of corporal damage from excessive blood loss. But it's not a replacement.
Nutrients are dissolved in your bloodstream, and they feed your cells. You'd very rapidly start to run out of energy. Your body temperature would drop, your heart rate would slow, and you'd die like a campfire with no wood.
Your cells excrete carbon dioxide and other wastes, which are dissolved in your bloodstream and are disposed of by your kidneys and lungs. If, for example, the blood replacement doesn't dissolve CO2, it never osmoises through the cellular membranes, and your cells essentially suffocate.
Does this stuff have a clotting mechanism, or are you going to bleed to death from a paper cut?
And, your immune system is a blood-borne system. With no immune system, you'd be in exactly the same position as an acute AIDS patient.
Either way, this is not a permanent replacement for blood, you're not going to bleed to death in designer colors, and I'm sure this stuff confers absolutely no benefits to your body except as a very temporary replacement in the case of an accident-induced blood shortage.
I wonder how effectively the body will get rid of this stuff as it replaces it?
It's a shame it won't occur to anyone outside the geek community that the reason MICROS~1 can't port Office to Linux is that they can't write anything in an environment where they can't freely hack the OS to get around problems.
Well, I love the admission that the article makes. I mean, my last time programming was assembly language on an Amiga 1000. But even with my woefully outdated programming skills, it's painfully obvious that M$ apps have had an interface to the OS advantage over everyone else.
Why should Windows source code be required to port Office (let alone write it)? Corel certainly didn't get Windows source code to write WordPerfect 8.
But the process is even more complex than it sounds, since most Microsoft applications--especially those in the Office suite--use a number of proprietary interfaces, and each application requires specific workarounds.
Mainsoft has access to the Windows NT 4.0 and Windows 2000 source code, a necessity for the work it is doing.
(If M$ wasn't using their market dominance unfairly, wouldn't porting Office require only Office source code, not Windows source code?)
If this article is true, it's just a far more blatant piece of proof that Microsoft is corrupt, and really has to be broken into an OS division, distinct and different from their internet and applications businesses.
You can run a server on Bell's HSE. The only thing is they don't offer support for it.
43. If I have a domain name, is it possible to get the IP address associated with that name? The Bell Sympatico High Speed Edition service does not allow for the hosting of domain names other than the sympatico.ca domain.
That was from their FAQ. I suspect their problem with users hosting their own domains is the following:
41. Can I have a static IP address with the Bell Sympatico High Speed Edition service? The Bell Sympatico High Speed Edition service uses dynamic IP address allocation only. In the Internet environment where demand is growing at a fast pace, dynamic IP addressing allows for optimum usage of IP addresses.
Funny. dsl.ca lets me rent a static IP for an extra $5/mo.
Now, Bell's service agreement has softened up about servers, because when I did initially look into HSE as an alternative to @Home, they did specifically indicate that you were not allowed to use servers at all. Currently, this is the situation:
Without limiting the foregoing, you agree not to use the Service or any equipment provided in connection with the Service, for operation of an Internet Service Provider's business nor for any other non-residential purpose.
That's a lot better than it was when I looked, but one could argue that webserving at home is a non-residential use. (The same way that I like working on cars, but actually working on them at your residence is actually technically illegal in Toronto's zoning laws.) dsl.ca specifically covers "home office" options, perhaps allowing the use of their high speed connection for tasks associated with their small business or self-employment, without having to pay for expensive business-grade DSL.
Again, dsl.ca isn't perfect. But they're a lot more geek-friendly than the other two (three, if you count look.ca's unidirectional service) broadband options.
I have to strongly agree with this. I recently, foolishly, fed a non-Sony head cleaning tape through my X822.
Doesn't matter who made the cleaning cassette. Don't use them, they're very destructive.
The dry ones are abrasive and sand down your rotating video heads (which widens their gaps and therefore reduces their frequency response (resolution)). Further, as the heads protrude less and less from the video head drum, they contact the tape less, and the net effect is that the output is reduced. This means that the AGC in the video amps is cranked up higher and the amplifier noise ("hiss", in an audio amplifier) becomes more visible as snow on the screen. It's usually especially visible when the VCR is displaying a dark and rich color.
The wet video head cleaners tend to stick to the head drum, and it takes a lot of force for the capstan to drag the wet tape. The VCR, of course, just tries to play the tape, and it defaults to attempting to spin the capstan at a given speed. If the capstan motor won't do x RPMs, the VCR's computer just runs the motor harder until it either does the right speed or pops the motor. They're multiphase AC motors, and the driver transistors often fry with these wet head cleaner cassettes. Other stuff that happens with wet cleaning cassettes is that since the capstan is pulling on the tape really hard to drag it over the drum, the guideposts and stuff between the capstan/pinch roller and the head drum all get bent or knocked out of alignment. Take up reel tables and clutches often die, too.
Simply, a dry cleaning cassette is like trying to clean your glasses with fine sandpaper. A wet cleaning cassette is like trying to clean your glasses by throwing them over Niagara Falls. Either technique will remove fingerprints.
Go to Borders, pick up a book on VCR repair, and read the chapter on cleaning your VCR. It's easy, everything you need is available at Radio Shack, and your VCR's picture will be better than with any cleaning cassette. Don't try to clean your VCR without reading the book - they're very delicate; it'd be as dangerous as guessing at syntax for rm while logged in as root.
And then, give your cleaning cassettes to someone you don't like. The best part is, they'll even thank you.
I not only took it straight off to repair, but I bought a 2000S the same day. When the old deck came back, I gave it to my mother, who swapped out her old Teac thing. It was left off for a couple of weeks and when it was plugged back in the power supply fried itself, just like my old Teac deck. It was duly binned.
Well, anything electronic can and will eventually fail.
I have only a little experience with Teac consumer-grade stuff: I've replaced the heads in a Teac cassette deck, and I've gotta say, it was great. Flip the lid off, pull the knobs off the front, flip the door open and up, then take out the two screws holding the facepanel on. From there, I was able to change the head in a few minutes. All the test points to attach my oscilloscope and true RMS voltmeter (no Stallman jokes) were nicely labelled on the PC board, which make aligning it very easy.
I've never touched a Teac home VCR.
But, remember that Teac is one of the best regarded name in recording equipment. Teac/Tascam open-reel audio tape decks are right up there with ReVox and Ferrograph in reputation. And Teac VTRs are up there in the same rarefied atmosphere as Sony and Ampex.
Everything eventually will break. But I've never had any reason to knock Teac, either.
BTW, when something like that, normally plugged in all the time, dies when you first attempt to use it after it's been idle for a while, check all the filter capacitors, especially those near transformers and regulators. They dry out, lose their "form", and short out. This creates hum in the DC power and overloads the regulators, shutting down either that leg of the supply, or the whole supply. A fix is usually a trip to the electronics store, a bunch of electrolytic capacitors, and 20 minutes of soldering.
Really? Have the Trinitron tubes really been out that long? I don't know much about the TVs, but the Trinitron tubes in the monitors certainly don't last as long as a 'standard' CRT before the picture goes fuzzy, and I've seen a lot of them.
Sony has never made a color TV set that wasn't a Trinitron.
Remember, back in the late 1960s, the only kind of color TV picture tube there was was a "Delta". If you look at the front of a very old color TV set, you'll usually notice that the phosphor dots are arranged in little triangular patterns. That's in contrast to a more modern TV set where the picture tube has an inline gun, and the phosphors reflect that by being arranged in vertical stripes or segments.
Note that this doesn't apply to computer monitors. All VGA monitors I've ever opened have inline guns, and with the exception of the Trinitrons, they seem to have delta-type phosphors. (Like a four door car with three door handles, something doesn't add up. Weird.)
Anyhow, the prime advantage of the inline tube is that it simplifies convergence (making the red, blue and green guns all point at the same cluster of phosphors at the same time - look for color fringing at the corners of your TV sets and monitors to see misconvergence).
But Sony's inline tubes take it to the next level: instead of having three guns arranged in one row at the neck of the tube, a Sony Trinitron has *one* gun at the back, with three cathodes. In effect, it's a gun that shoots three different bullets at once. It's a lot easier to aim one gun than it is three; and so it's a great improvement on the three-gun inline systems.
Add to that the sharp corners and flatter screens that Sony was able to manufacture (with atrocious yield rates at first, BTW) and the early Trinitrons became very popular. Now, of course, Sony has improved on that with the ultraflat Wega (which still appears to be a kind of Trinitron) but I don't know anything about the CRT arrangements in their new line.
So, when Sony sold their first color TV sets in North America in 1969, they were all Trinitrons. (Wow. That was from memory, too, but I wanted to confirm it, and I did... Head to this link on Sony's website!
Sony's electronics were also way ahead at the time, too: in 1954 Sony sold their first transistor radios in North America, and were pioneers in transistorized TV sets. In 1969, the only other solid state (transistorized) color TV sets were Zeniths. Everybody else was still using all tubes or hybrids (tubes and transistors mixed), with the many reliability and efficiency problems that tubes have.
(Sidetracked...) When I was a kid, I had a 19" Motorola color TV set from 1972 that actually had a ?6BQ5? horizontal output tube. There was a damper tube, and a high voltage rectifier tube (1B3), and a high voltage regulator tube. And all of those tubes were driven off a little 16 pin DIP IC that sat in a tiny white socket right beside them. (This was back in the days when all ICs and transistors were socketed.)
As for Trinitrons dying sooner, nah, I don't think that's actually the case. When the color starts to fail (ie. white starts to go pink, and adjusting the bias and screen controls inside (do this *only* if you know what you're doing) won't bring it back), it's generally because the barium oxide coating is worn off the CRT cathodes. That takes a lot of use. All picture tubes have a finite lifespan, but usually the electronics surrounding the picture tube will die before it does.
In my experience, places where you see lots of Sony monitors (like the flight displays at Terminal 3 at Pearson International Airport) are also the places where they rack up the most hours. Of course you can expect them to go pink faster.
BTW, the "pink" color is actually a purplish-pink, caused by the fact that the green phosphors require the most energy (and therefore cathode lifespan) to light up. The blue is somewhat behind. So, it appears that the green goes first, and the blue emission starts to get low, leaving a field of mostly red. Hence the trademark pinky-purple color of a worn out CRT.
After owning a bit of sony hardware (phones and audio equpit.) and checking out Consumer Reports, they are third in defective hardware. Is this going to be a shot to the proverbial foot for Transmeta?
I can't speak for Consumer Reports testing process, but I have seen similar sounding measurements of product "quality". Primarily, they survey repair shops and find out what makes and models they end up repairing the most.
The Sony/Panasonic/Toshiba/etc stuff is only apparently less reliable in this sort of study because people seldom bring broken Samsung/Gold Star/Funai/etc to the repair shop - they just bin it.
That's not to say that anyone makes good consumer electronics these days - it's all cheap, disposeable plastic crap. They're as expendable as a Honda or a Toyota. But I will say this, Sony stuff is usually pretty consistent.
For one thing, it's a rare Sony Trinitron TV set that doesn't make it to its 20th anniversary. Sadly, I'll have to wait another 19 years to see if last year's models make it that long. Note that in those 20 years, the TV set may have had to go in for a repair once. The no-name or off-brand stuff is long landfilled.
In a TV station I worked in, we had huge piles of Sony KV-1710 TV sets that were all over the building as on-air monitors and stuff like that. Nothing really serious, TV in the Green Room, General Manager's office, etc. These things were *always* on during the day, and lived a hard life. I must have put new picture tubes into half of them (the electronics just wouldn't die, even though the screens were burned in). Finally, we started to replace them as they broke. They'd usually pop a fuse or something and play dead, so I'd replace them with a new Sony KV-1926. People would hang around the engineering department, hoping that I'd fix one of the old KV-1710s for them to take home. And out of a fleet of thirty+ of them, I only ended up using two for parts - the rest got nice retirements.
One of the parts TV sets had come off the mobile truck, where it had been bolted up as the PROGRAM monitor over the sound guy's console. It bit the dust when one of the talent was driving the mobile truck and smacked it into an awning. A hole was torn through both the side of the truck and the side of the TV set. (Hint: No matter how loudly the weatherman begs to try driving the "big truck", never let him.)
The other parts TV set was just badly broken electronically (bad flyback transformer, horizontal output, damper, horiz oscillator and power supply regulator). I wasn't surprised it was dead. I was surprised that it was the *only one* that was really too far gone.
If Sony builds their computers like their TV sets (and, indeed, like most of their consumer and professional video equipment), if you treat it right, it'll last you a while.
Considering the widely negative reviews I've seen with dsl.ca I'm surprised at your comments. You're the first person I've seen who has said anything positive about them. Are they actually providing the 1.2meg service they are advertising on the website? If so how?
Actually, for sustained transfers and stuff, yeah, I actually top out about 800k/sec, which is a little short of the 1.2 megs promised. But, it's rare that I get 800k/sec, too: I think that's more a factor of internet traffic than it is Velocet (dsl.ca).
The other thing, too, is that the PPPoE overhead will eat up a certain percentage of the DSL "modem"'s capacity. Doesn't PPPoE cost about 15-20%?
While PPPoE is not ideal, I really don't have much problem with them, except that their ping times seem to be high. When I do a traceroute, it seems to me that it takes a huge number of hops to get from me to the Toronto backbone.
What the hell is reptiles.org?
[*****@proxy/]$./usr/sbin/traceroute slashdot.org
traceroute to slashdot.org (64.28.67.48), 30 hops max, 40 byte packets
1 trebucbet-redf1x.tor.velocet.net (204.138.59.213) 73.023 ms 62.160 ms 51.
985 ms
2 hadrian-trebucbet.tor.velocet.net (216.126.83.25) 74.320 ms 57.738 ms 60.
070 ms
3 gate.velocet.net (216.126.81.1) 62.594 ms 69.898 ms 62.918 ms
4 gw-151.reptiles.org (204.138.40.5) 64.112 ms 61.132 ms 59.473 ms
5 209.135.88.249 (209.135.88.249) 63.479 ms 61.737 ms 63.535 ms
6 209.135.96.17 (209.135.96.17) 67.638 ms 78.423 ms 67.265 ms
7 dis1-toronto63-pos7-3.in.bellnexxia.net (206.108.111.29) 79.217 ms 80.167
ms 79.363 ms
8 core1-toronto63-pos1-2.in.bellnexxia.net (206.108.98.5) 83.207 ms 80.710 m
s 111.743 ms
9 bx1-chicago23-pos3-0.in.bellnexxia.net (206.108.98.42) 94.517 ms 87.950 ms
79.582 ms
10 exodus-gw.bx1-chicago23-pos7-3.in.bellnexxia.net (206.108.108.250) 79.043 m
s 160.032 ms 150.868 ms
11 bbr02-g2-0.okbr01.exodus.net (216.34.183.98) 119.095 ms 101.186 ms 115.64
7 ms
12 bbr01-p5-0.wlhm01.exodus.net (216.32.132.210) 150.731 ms 132.936 ms 103.2
58 ms
13 dcr04-g1-0.wlhm01.exodus.net (64.14.70.50) 103.193 ms 104.853 ms 107.543
ms
14 64.14.80.146 (64.14.80.146) 114.489 ms 133.506 ms 143.776 ms
15 64.28.66.203 (64.28.66.203) 134.878 ms 138.133 ms 126.927 ms
16 slashdot.org (64.28.67.48) 123.078 ms 116.882 ms 131.026 ms
I'm not a gamer; high ping times aren't really much of a problem, because the sustained data transfer rates are consistently great.
What happens if I choose not to use your high-performance proxy or I'm serving (uploading) off my ADSL connection? If you do not wish to use our proxy and/or are serving off your ADSL connection (i.e. uploading), we offer 5 Gigs of download/upload data transfer monthly at no cost. This averages out to 250 Megs per day. Even with a fairly popular website hosted on your ADSL connection, you will not come close to exceeding that. Should you exceed your 5 Gig free, we charge you what we pay for additional bandwidth: $10.00 a month per additional Gig."
Notice that they're the only high speed consumer ISP I've ever seen that says, "Sure, you can run a website off your DSL connection".
I agree, I'd prefer to not be asked to use their proxy server. In fact, I don't. But I can also understand that bandwidth costs money, and that if Yahoo, etc, is cached locally, they can provide everything with no problems to the average user.
But remember, 5 gigs a month really is a hell of a lot of information. Unless you're talking about the overhead of leaving Gnutella running. <grin>
False advertising? You have to wonder about anybody who engages in misleading [and IMHO false] advertising that dsl.ca is doing.
No more so that any DSL provider talking about the security and speed of an individual connection, versus that of a shared connection a-la cable. Gimme a break. Everything on the Internet is an exercise in shared bandwidth.
@Home and Sympatico HSE specifically forbid servers. Now, could they ban me because some versions of ICQ actually include a little webserver? Bet your ass they could. Could they eventually turn me off because Napster is a server? How about my own personal goals of running Apache and stuff? Of the three high speed ISPs available in my location (Toronto) at the time, as they would have cost me, they were as follows:
Rogers@Home: $50/mo (I don't have cable TV). DHCP. No servers allowed. 5 POP3 mailboxes. Small hosted site.
Sympatico HSE: $40/mo. DHCP with PPPoE. No servers allowed. 3? POP3 mailboxes. Small hosted site. All aspects of their service are unreliable (from what www.sympaticousers.org was saying at the time)
dsl.ca: $40/mo. DHCP with PPPoE, static IP option. Servers allowed. 5 gigs/mo cap before extra charges. Web e-mail accounts included, POP3 available at extra cost (Yahoo offers free POP3). Service seems to be stable and reliable, with little speed brownouts every now and then (usually late at night); apparently the Bell loop cards and lines aren't the items that make Bell Sympatico HSE unreliable, since dsl.ca uses them, too.
look.ca: Not really a high speed ISP at the time, since their upstream is through a dial-up connection. Part of the attraction of a high speed ISP is the always-on connection. Besides, $40/mo (I don't get Look TV service), no servers allowed, requires my phone line, slow uplink, no static IP, weird hardware reminiscent of a unidirectional cable modem attached to a flat microwave antenna on my house. Oh yeah, and they have an idle cutout of 5 minutes, and a busy cutout(!) of six hours, where they disconnect you halfway through downloading a big file.
dsl.ca just seems to be more geek-friendly than most high speed consumer ISPs. And that's mostly why I'm with them.
I may be missing someting, but what does system uptimte have to do with DSL stability?
LOL Nothing directly, of course.
The DSL connection is made when Linux boots.
The DSL connection is not automatically reconnected if it goes down. (I just haven't gotten around to creating the scripts.)
I haven't paid the extra $5/mo for a static IP yet, mostly because I still want the ability to log off and get a new IP address if I think someone has cracked my box. (I'm not new to using a *NIX system, just new to being root.)
The uptime display there came from telnetting (bad, I know, but I never do it as root, and my passwords are all huge and ugly) into my box, and using copy and paste to put it into a message. The DSL connection must still be up for that to work, and has been up since the computer was last booted. No interruptions, and, in fact, no IP changes, either.
Of course, I could just type "adsl-start" to restart my DSL connection if it went down, but I doubt that would work through telnet... you'll have to take my word for this (note, of course, that my IP address and username are hidden):
Last login: Mon Aug 14 15:12:32 from mail1.litton-marine.com
You have mail.
[*****@proxy *****]$ uptime
5:07pm up 20 days, 16:52, 1 user, load average: 0.00, 0.00, 0.00
[*****@proxy *****]$ cd/
[*****@proxy/]$./usr/sbin/adsl-status
adsl-status: Link is up and running on interface ppp0
ppp0 Link encap:Point-to-Point Protocol
inet addr:204.138.***.*** P-t-P:204.138.***.1 Mask:255.255.255.255
UP POINTOPOINT RUNNING NOARP MULTICAST MTU:1450 Metric:1
RX packets:1666960 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
TX packets:1175240 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
collisions:0 txqueuelen:10
Bottom line, I have lots of friends who are running LANs behind the scenes, and, at least in the Kingston area, none of them have been hassled.
Yeah. Most of the people I know in Toronto and Ottawa who are on either Shaw@Home or Rogers@Home are very happy with their service. Friends in Niagara Falls NY on Adelphia's unidirectional cable system love that, too, even piped into their LAN. It's worth noting that one of those friends actually works as a sales rep for Bell Atlantic DSL.
And, @Home sucks. Is ADSL any better?
Okay. Well, I've never had cable internet service.
My decision went as follows:
Price. Cable is $50/mo if you don't subscribe to cable TV.
Quality. Bell Canada's Sympatico HSE service is considered to be absolute junk, at $40/mo. (I use Bell long distance, so I don't have to pay the $10/mo grab.)
Server-Friendly? I wanted the option of a static IP, with an ISP that didn't care if I wanted to run a webserver in my home. Neither @Home or Symatico HSE offered that. And then, I lucked into something...
dsl.ca is a division of Velocet. They offer their DSL service only in Toronto at the moment. $34.95/mo + $5/mo modem rental (okay, no cheaper than Sympatico). But for an extra $5/mo, they'll rent a static IP. Installation went like a million bucks. PPPoE is the only downside, but even so, Roaring Penguin's PPPoE solution is great.
Many people complain about the stability of DSL connections. I have no concerns:
My PPPoE-based DSL connection is started up when my computer starts up. Most of that CPU load is actually top, then there's a bit from the PPPoE client. Even with all 5 computers on my home LAN streaming Real Video from the Big Brother website, the PPPoE client never gets about 2.5% or so CPU useage. (Pentium 133 with 32 megs RAM.)
If you're in Toronto, look into dsl.ca if you want a cable/Sympatico alternative. I love these guys.
Man was simply not meant to be intermingled with machines. Is this what you want, scientists? Insert a controllable chip inside a man in exchange for a piece of his human soul? I don't often use threats of hellfire and wrath upon my fellow man, but I'm afraid that's what ADS is looking forward to. I'm a man, dammit! I don't want a piece of silicon inside my body... no matter how painless, cheap, or convenient it may be.
Well, that's one more pacemaker for the rest of us.
I do not agree with prejudiced religious men like Falwell or Robertson, nor am I out to burn everything that's not Christian. Your generalization is immensely unfair.
Not true. Not true at all.
First off, I've read a couple of your other posts, and I do have to indicate that as far as Christians go, I have to commend you for being relatively unobjectionable.
Since you appear to be one of the few people I have ever encountered who identifies both as a Christian, and then actually appears to "live and let live", you are a special individual.
I must assure you, though, having a Baptist family living next door and a Catholic church across the street, Christianity is a family of religions that seems to promote even less tolerance and freedom of opinion than even Islam.
Well you know, back in the Roman Empire, we were rounded up and fed to lions. (Hey if everyone else is so focused on long past persecutions I'll join them)
Don't even go there. More wars, violent deaths, and tortures have occurred on the basis of Christianity than all the other religions of the world have caused.
While a few thousand people were turned to Colisseum Cat Chow for the entertainment of the Romans, things did change shortly after that.
The fall of the Roman Empire gave rise to one even more dangerous and more powerful: The Roman Catholic Empire.
Throughout the middle ages, Jews, Wiccans and people of other religious denominations that have predated Christianity by millenia were persecuted, forced to convert, and if they didn't, were killed off by the thousands.
It continued for a long time after that: Ever hear of the Spanish Inquisition? The Salem Witch Trials? Hell, at Salem, you didn't even have to be a Wiccan to be burned as a witch.
And then, Christian vs. Christian bloodshed runs rampant in the world today. My own family is from Northern Ireland, and when I was a child, my own grandfather used to tell me stories about how he used to shoot Catholics for fun. How different are Catholics and Protestants? How different can they be? Don't they share the same god?
To this day, Christians are the most intolerant people in the world. Middle of the road average-Joe Christians are programmed by the church to think homosexuals are going to hell. There's enough evidence now that Helen Keller could see that gay people are a normal part of the population. And yet Christianity drives thousands of gay teenagers to kill themselves every year, because of their "abnormal lifestyle". I think every red-blooded man can agree that there is no lifestyle more abnormal than celibacy, and yet the Catholic Church demands that of their priests. Little hypocrisy, anyone?
Even more hypocrisy: Doesn't the bible tell us that God doesn't like it when we worship other deities? Isn't Christianity, which is basically the worship of a dead carpenter named Jesus Christ, completely ignoring that? Or, because it's His Son, does that make it okay? Add to that the Catholic affinity for the Virgin (ie. didn't get caught in the bushes with Joseph's brother) Mary and all the Saints just add to the mess? And when people bow to the Pope, aren't they worshipping him? Christianity seems to be, in reality, about as polythiestic as the Pagan religion of the Vikings, or as those of the ancient Greco-Roman peoples.
So, forgive me for calling you on your little blurb about how many Christians died during the Roman Empire. Perhaps if we finally threw off the shackles of organized religion and tried just being nice to each other, humanity could enjoy a far greater standard of living.
Come the afterlife, if there is one, I'm sure that I'll be okay. If God is rejecting people from Heaven because they're Jewish instead of Baptist or Hindu because instead of Catholic, the crapshoot is so great that you'd never know what religion to believe in order to be allowed in. In other words, ask to be buried in Bermuda shorts. Or, better still, get cremated to help acclimatize yourself. But, if there is a God, I have faith that He would be more concerned about what kind of life you led, not who/how you worshipped.
Any RedHat version newer than that should automatically configure your sound for you (at least it has in my experience).
Yeah. I've got RH6.2, and while I've installed it on probably half a dozen machines around the office now, I still haven't installed it on one with a sound card yet.
I do, however, know that RH6.2's installer is a lot more advanced than RH6's; so it wouldn't surprise me if sound detection has been added.
But, this is all beside the point.
We're familiar enough with Linux and with computers in general that we think nothing of joining in a discussion board where most of us type our replies in HTML.
We take it for granted that we'll be able to figure out how to use a new application or toss a new piece of hardware at our computers and make it work.
Linux embodies that. It's been said before, and I will say it again: it's the operating system by computer geeks and for computer geeks.
AOL's interface is the epitome of dumbed-down for the masses, and it's in such stark contrast to the intimidating power of the Linux system that combining the two feels like a travesty.
My concern never was literally that AOL users would end up using vi, because I don't think that's physically possible. Nor do I expect that they'd ever have to manually configure a sound card - let's face it, AOL's interest is only in creating closed internet appliances.
Now, you can't tell me that the image of an AOL user slugging it out with vi and the contents of his/etc/ directory doesn't make you want to fall over laughing?
RedHat 6.0, circa November 1999, on a Dell Optiplex GL-5133 (Pentium 133) with a genuine SoundBlaster 16.
conf.modules was my friend. And so was vi, which I voluntarily use over pico or emacs, mostly because when I got my first internet access in 1988, that was the only text editor available to me at shell. And therefore, nebulous and clumsy as it is, I know it well.
In later years we just became a helpline for any fool who would call us. I once spent 3 hours trying to determine why a mail system had lost a vast amount of mail, only to discover that the fool that called me had deleted the directory and wanted to find an excuse to cover his back. I also wasted a whole day looking into a filesystem problem which didn't exist, instead of a network device driver issue due to some idiot not being able to read me the last line in a log file, and instead reading the line 5 entries from the end.
Remember, way back when, the simple complexity (!) of computers was enough to keep the idiots at bay. Hell, most of 'em couldn't even turn the damned things on.
Today, sadly, that has changed. The death of computing as being synonymous with intelligence is upon us.
Even if you spend a million on creation of the video, it would be worth it. Better educated customers, more loyal customers, etc.
Sure, that's absolutely great if you're building a Hewlett-Packard Pavillion that you're going to sell in quantity through all the Fry's and Circuit Citys.
But, let's face it, how many of these servers is VA Linux really going to sell? A couple of hundred before they make a change that makes the video obsolete?
When you then divide the production costs of the video by the total number of machines you expect to sell to which the video will apply, what are the final costs per machine? How practical is this? Not very, is my guess.
How are you going to distribute this? VHS videocassette? That's expensive. A CD is a lot cheaper, especially if your computer is going to have a CD-ROM drive.
But how is the video going to help those really basic users who don't even know how to plug the monitor into the video card, let alone start up the machine, toss in a CD-ROM and let Windows autorun it?
How long will more advanced users stick with the video, if it starts out explaining to beginners that the CD-ROM drive is not a cupholder?
This is a problem that lacks an easy solution.
Re:Time to cut Florida off the 'Net.
on
Gnutella Vs. SPAM
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· Score: 2
The elderly and their money are easily parted.
Forget their money. I want nana's cherry old rust-free low-mileage 1974 Plymouth Scamp.
(Let's face it, Florida's roads will be safer if she takes the bus to bingo instead. Scamp vs. Honda = slightly dented Scamp, completely flattened Honda.)
Florida is inexpensive - a 3/2 house runs around $100k.
Up here in Toronto, I live in a three-bedroom 2-bath house on a big main street and right beside a housing project (gunshots and Acuras with loud stereos all night). Despite that, it's valued at over $279,000 CDN. And that doesn't include the snowblower I need to get into and out of the driveway for five months of the year.
$100k. Wow.
In most counties, your 'homestead' is protected in bankruptcy proceedings - scam artists can hang on to land and buildings up to $1 million when their schemes unravel.
Mega-wow. Of course, that's only meant to promote legitimate enterpreneurs. Sure.
No state income tax, so add 6% to your take-home.
Wow.
The weather is nice if you like Turkish baths and lightning). We have beaches where the water is warm.
Yeah, I've gotta say, I've been to Florida a couple of times, and I love the climate. Both times were in August, both times I felt right at home in the sweltering heat and humidity. (I like being too hot more than being too cold.)
And what snake-oil salesman wouldn't feel at home with alligators in his backyard??
Yeah, and he gets to crush all the smaller reptiles that always seem to be underfoot there.
You know, just after I clicked submit on that last post, I thought of something about Microsoft's tech support.
I've watched users pull out their per-minute M$ tech support 1-900 phone numbers, and be prompted over the phone to make all sorts of system settings changes. Which, as anyone who has ever touched a Windows box knows, will require a reboot.
Perhaps the reason that Windows doesn't let you restart processes without having to reboot the computer is so that M$ can force tech support customers to stay on the phone longer, thus generating more revenues?
Think about it. If the average Windows 9x/ME box takes 3 minutes to reboot and in the course of a tech support call has to be rebooted 3 times (probably not far off), that's nine more billable minutes. How much is a billable minute? How many Windows users call M$'s tech support?
The did not want to install it so why should they support it? Refer the Mandrake instead and ask them if the can help with the driver issues on that particular hardware setup.
Maybe the reason VA Linux has a policy against installing Mandrake is because they know it lacks the support for their hardware...
Seriously, you aren't asking netscape to provide support for windows either.
I'm sure people call them all the time, wondering why their modem isn't working ("because I need the modem to use Netscape, it must be Netscape's responsibility") or many other Windows-related problems that the inept may assume are an application's fault. Hey, if you're charging for tech support on a per-incident basis, Windows-related problems must be a gravy train for Netscape's tech support revenues.
"What ever happened to tech support? It used to be that companies would trip over themselves to make customers happy. Today it seems that unless you are spending 1 million plus dollars, they could give a crap less. When spending $12K plus on a single server, you would expect that the thing would work, huh? Are there any vendors who do provide good all around customer support these days?"
Remember that today's computer companies often make tiny margins on their sales.
Remember also that computers are complicated things, regardless of the operating system being used. Users will always call up with stupid, basic questions, wasting the tech support time (and therefore budgets).
In a stint where I did a lot of help desk tech support, I'd often get stupid questions about why is the monitor still black (turn it on), why doesn't the RAM I bought fit into the computer (I later found out the guy was trying to stuff it into the floppy disk drive but that thought *never* crossed my mind when I was on the phone with him, killing an hour of phone time), your computer must be broken because I can't get Yahoo to work (Failed to Connect error - the guy didn't even have a modem, let alone an internet account anywhere). Granted, with a rack-mounted Linux server, the questions will be a lot less basic, but still equally stupid to anyone really familiar with Linux. These will *hog* tech support time and dollars.
Customer service has had to become a thing of the past, unless you're willing to call the helpful 1-900 number or fork out your Visa on a per-incident basis.
That's the way it is and will be for the forseeable future. Unless you're in women's fashions, where the markup is often well over 100% and the number of possible tech support questions related to the newly redesigned belt buckle and zipper are limited.
It's simply not built into the cost of the sale anymore. It's a good thing, too - if it were, an el-cheapo Celeron could run way over $3,000.
Legal commercial advertisements are fine, but this delivery method is NOT. They are not being censored. Imagine if you were looking for a book in a library, and you picked a few up and checked them out, only to find that although the cover looked like the book you wanted, ALL OF THE INSIDE PAGES WERE ADS. Imagine that this happened with every book in the library.
Actually, I'd liken it more to stickers with ads stuck to the pages of the library books.
Obscuring the text you're wanting to read, you'd have to peel the stickers off the pages (and occasionally lift the text you want to read with them) before you could actually make such a defaced book useful again.
I'm sure that legitimate Gnutella sharing servers will still be in there somewhere, but I really don't like the looks of the future Gnutella if this system is allowed to survive.
Imagine getting 100+ responses to every search, 96 of each responses being from spam. It would take forever to find anything, effectively killing Gnutella's usefulness.
Perhaps the RIAA/MPAA had something to do with this?
I suggest we take steps to destroy it now. Anyone have an offshore ISP that is immune to legal action from yanking Sharezilla's website?
Man, oh man, if only I were in high school again. I beat the snot out of a kid who was tearing the pages out of books because he was too cheap to use the photocopier. (I was a bit of an unorthodox library geek back then, and while I was also an autoshop grease-monkey and an electronics lab terror, I've always loved books.) Anyone who assumes that nerds are placid sheep is an idiot. I see a wonderful parallel here... do any Slashdotters have nothing to lose?
Slashdot Mirror
Wow. That only serves to increase my desire to live in the Los Angeles area. Hey, do they have "La Fin Du Monde" there?
No snow = positive. (But it's not a long flight to Colorado when I feel the need to ski.)
Few places to play hockey = no big deal to me.
Anyone interested in hiring a Canuck?
As for American beer, there are some good ones. Those that come to mind are: Pete's Wicked Ale, Sam Adams and Jerimiah Red which is available at a Pizza chain whose name escapes me.Call me crazy (and you probably will), but I really like Gennessee.
Then again, I also love Moxie, though I'm sure that's really hard to get in L.A.
Get a full transfusion, then when you get a cut, you'll bleed milky white, and everyone'll think you're a robot!
Sure. But you'd have problems before you got cut.
I'm sure that this stuff is meant to fill up your bloodstream to avert the most immediate causes of corporal damage from excessive blood loss. But it's not a replacement.
Nutrients are dissolved in your bloodstream, and they feed your cells. You'd very rapidly start to run out of energy. Your body temperature would drop, your heart rate would slow, and you'd die like a campfire with no wood.
Your cells excrete carbon dioxide and other wastes, which are dissolved in your bloodstream and are disposed of by your kidneys and lungs. If, for example, the blood replacement doesn't dissolve CO2, it never osmoises through the cellular membranes, and your cells essentially suffocate.
Does this stuff have a clotting mechanism, or are you going to bleed to death from a paper cut?
And, your immune system is a blood-borne system. With no immune system, you'd be in exactly the same position as an acute AIDS patient.
Either way, this is not a permanent replacement for blood, you're not going to bleed to death in designer colors, and I'm sure this stuff confers absolutely no benefits to your body except as a very temporary replacement in the case of an accident-induced blood shortage.
I wonder how effectively the body will get rid of this stuff as it replaces it?
Well, I love the admission that the article makes. I mean, my last time programming was assembly language on an Amiga 1000. But even with my woefully outdated programming skills, it's painfully obvious that M$ apps have had an interface to the OS advantage over everyone else.
Why should Windows source code be required to port Office (let alone write it)? Corel certainly didn't get Windows source code to write WordPerfect 8.
But the process is even more complex than it sounds, since most Microsoft applications--especially those in the Office suite--use a number of proprietary interfaces, and each application requires specific workarounds.
Mainsoft has access to the Windows NT 4.0 and Windows 2000 source code, a necessity for the work it is doing.
(If M$ wasn't using their market dominance unfairly, wouldn't porting Office require only Office source code, not Windows source code?)
If this article is true, it's just a far more blatant piece of proof that Microsoft is corrupt, and really has to be broken into an OS division, distinct and different from their internet and applications businesses.
At this very moment, a SkiDoo dealer is packing up for his new position as VP of Marketing to Hell.
At this very moment, pigs are growing wings.
At this very moment... Ah, who cares. I don't want that damned paperclip on my Linux box.
You can run a server on Bell's HSE. The only thing is they don't offer support for it.
43. If I have a domain name, is it possible to get the IP address associated with that name?
The Bell Sympatico High Speed Edition service does not allow for the hosting of domain names other than the sympatico.ca domain.
That was from their FAQ. I suspect their problem with users hosting their own domains is the following:
41. Can I have a static IP address with the Bell Sympatico High Speed Edition service?
The Bell Sympatico High Speed Edition service uses dynamic IP address allocation only. In the Internet environment where demand is growing at a fast pace, dynamic IP addressing allows for optimum usage of IP addresses.
Funny. dsl.ca lets me rent a static IP for an extra $5/mo.
Now, Bell's service agreement has softened up about servers, because when I did initially look into HSE as an alternative to @Home, they did specifically indicate that you were not allowed to use servers at all. Currently, this is the situation:
Without limiting the foregoing, you agree not to use the Service or any equipment provided in connection with the Service, for operation of an Internet Service Provider's business nor for any other non-residential purpose.
Their Agreement.
That's a lot better than it was when I looked, but one could argue that webserving at home is a non-residential use. (The same way that I like working on cars, but actually working on them at your residence is actually technically illegal in Toronto's zoning laws.) dsl.ca specifically covers "home office" options, perhaps allowing the use of their high speed connection for tasks associated with their small business or self-employment, without having to pay for expensive business-grade DSL.
Again, dsl.ca isn't perfect. But they're a lot more geek-friendly than the other two (three, if you count look.ca's unidirectional service) broadband options.
Doesn't matter who made the cleaning cassette. Don't use them, they're very destructive.
The dry ones are abrasive and sand down your rotating video heads (which widens their gaps and therefore reduces their frequency response (resolution)). Further, as the heads protrude less and less from the video head drum, they contact the tape less, and the net effect is that the output is reduced. This means that the AGC in the video amps is cranked up higher and the amplifier noise ("hiss", in an audio amplifier) becomes more visible as snow on the screen. It's usually especially visible when the VCR is displaying a dark and rich color.
The wet video head cleaners tend to stick to the head drum, and it takes a lot of force for the capstan to drag the wet tape. The VCR, of course, just tries to play the tape, and it defaults to attempting to spin the capstan at a given speed. If the capstan motor won't do x RPMs, the VCR's computer just runs the motor harder until it either does the right speed or pops the motor. They're multiphase AC motors, and the driver transistors often fry with these wet head cleaner cassettes. Other stuff that happens with wet cleaning cassettes is that since the capstan is pulling on the tape really hard to drag it over the drum, the guideposts and stuff between the capstan/pinch roller and the head drum all get bent or knocked out of alignment. Take up reel tables and clutches often die, too.
Simply, a dry cleaning cassette is like trying to clean your glasses with fine sandpaper. A wet cleaning cassette is like trying to clean your glasses by throwing them over Niagara Falls. Either technique will remove fingerprints.
Go to Borders, pick up a book on VCR repair, and read the chapter on cleaning your VCR. It's easy, everything you need is available at Radio Shack, and your VCR's picture will be better than with any cleaning cassette. Don't try to clean your VCR without reading the book - they're very delicate; it'd be as dangerous as guessing at syntax for rm while logged in as root.
And then, give your cleaning cassettes to someone you don't like. The best part is, they'll even thank you.
I not only took it straight off to repair, but I bought a 2000S the same day. When the old deck came back, I gave it to my mother, who swapped out her old Teac thing. It was left off for a couple of weeks and when it was plugged back in the power supply fried itself, just like my old Teac deck. It was duly binned.Well, anything electronic can and will eventually fail.
I have only a little experience with Teac consumer-grade stuff: I've replaced the heads in a Teac cassette deck, and I've gotta say, it was great. Flip the lid off, pull the knobs off the front, flip the door open and up, then take out the two screws holding the facepanel on. From there, I was able to change the head in a few minutes. All the test points to attach my oscilloscope and true RMS voltmeter (no Stallman jokes) were nicely labelled on the PC board, which make aligning it very easy.
I've never touched a Teac home VCR.
But, remember that Teac is one of the best regarded name in recording equipment. Teac/Tascam open-reel audio tape decks are right up there with ReVox and Ferrograph in reputation. And Teac VTRs are up there in the same rarefied atmosphere as Sony and Ampex.
Everything eventually will break. But I've never had any reason to knock Teac, either.
BTW, when something like that, normally plugged in all the time, dies when you first attempt to use it after it's been idle for a while, check all the filter capacitors, especially those near transformers and regulators. They dry out, lose their "form", and short out. This creates hum in the DC power and overloads the regulators, shutting down either that leg of the supply, or the whole supply. A fix is usually a trip to the electronics store, a bunch of electrolytic capacitors, and 20 minutes of soldering.
Sony has never made a color TV set that wasn't a Trinitron.
Remember, back in the late 1960s, the only kind of color TV picture tube there was was a "Delta". If you look at the front of a very old color TV set, you'll usually notice that the phosphor dots are arranged in little triangular patterns. That's in contrast to a more modern TV set where the picture tube has an inline gun, and the phosphors reflect that by being arranged in vertical stripes or segments.
Note that this doesn't apply to computer monitors. All VGA monitors I've ever opened have inline guns, and with the exception of the Trinitrons, they seem to have delta-type phosphors. (Like a four door car with three door handles, something doesn't add up. Weird.)
Anyhow, the prime advantage of the inline tube is that it simplifies convergence (making the red, blue and green guns all point at the same cluster of phosphors at the same time - look for color fringing at the corners of your TV sets and monitors to see misconvergence).
But Sony's inline tubes take it to the next level: instead of having three guns arranged in one row at the neck of the tube, a Sony Trinitron has *one* gun at the back, with three cathodes. In effect, it's a gun that shoots three different bullets at once. It's a lot easier to aim one gun than it is three; and so it's a great improvement on the three-gun inline systems.
Add to that the sharp corners and flatter screens that Sony was able to manufacture (with atrocious yield rates at first, BTW) and the early Trinitrons became very popular. Now, of course, Sony has improved on that with the ultraflat Wega (which still appears to be a kind of Trinitron) but I don't know anything about the CRT arrangements in their new line.
So, when Sony sold their first color TV sets in North America in 1969, they were all Trinitrons. (Wow. That was from memory, too, but I wanted to confirm it, and I did... Head to this link on Sony's website!
Sony's electronics were also way ahead at the time, too: in 1954 Sony sold their first transistor radios in North America, and were pioneers in transistorized TV sets. In 1969, the only other solid state (transistorized) color TV sets were Zeniths. Everybody else was still using all tubes or hybrids (tubes and transistors mixed), with the many reliability and efficiency problems that tubes have.
(Sidetracked...) When I was a kid, I had a 19" Motorola color TV set from 1972 that actually had a ?6BQ5? horizontal output tube. There was a damper tube, and a high voltage rectifier tube (1B3), and a high voltage regulator tube. And all of those tubes were driven off a little 16 pin DIP IC that sat in a tiny white socket right beside them. (This was back in the days when all ICs and transistors were socketed.)
As for Trinitrons dying sooner, nah, I don't think that's actually the case. When the color starts to fail (ie. white starts to go pink, and adjusting the bias and screen controls inside (do this *only* if you know what you're doing) won't bring it back), it's generally because the barium oxide coating is worn off the CRT cathodes. That takes a lot of use. All picture tubes have a finite lifespan, but usually the electronics surrounding the picture tube will die before it does.
In my experience, places where you see lots of Sony monitors (like the flight displays at Terminal 3 at Pearson International Airport) are also the places where they rack up the most hours. Of course you can expect them to go pink faster.
BTW, the "pink" color is actually a purplish-pink, caused by the fact that the green phosphors require the most energy (and therefore cathode lifespan) to light up. The blue is somewhat behind. So, it appears that the green goes first, and the blue emission starts to get low, leaving a field of mostly red. Hence the trademark pinky-purple color of a worn out CRT.
<sigh> I guess I'm a video geek.
I can't speak for Consumer Reports testing process, but I have seen similar sounding measurements of product "quality". Primarily, they survey repair shops and find out what makes and models they end up repairing the most.
The Sony/Panasonic/Toshiba/etc stuff is only apparently less reliable in this sort of study because people seldom bring broken Samsung/Gold Star/Funai/etc to the repair shop - they just bin it.
That's not to say that anyone makes good consumer electronics these days - it's all cheap, disposeable plastic crap. They're as expendable as a Honda or a Toyota. But I will say this, Sony stuff is usually pretty consistent.
For one thing, it's a rare Sony Trinitron TV set that doesn't make it to its 20th anniversary. Sadly, I'll have to wait another 19 years to see if last year's models make it that long. Note that in those 20 years, the TV set may have had to go in for a repair once. The no-name or off-brand stuff is long landfilled.
In a TV station I worked in, we had huge piles of Sony KV-1710 TV sets that were all over the building as on-air monitors and stuff like that. Nothing really serious, TV in the Green Room, General Manager's office, etc. These things were *always* on during the day, and lived a hard life. I must have put new picture tubes into half of them (the electronics just wouldn't die, even though the screens were burned in). Finally, we started to replace them as they broke. They'd usually pop a fuse or something and play dead, so I'd replace them with a new Sony KV-1926. People would hang around the engineering department, hoping that I'd fix one of the old KV-1710s for them to take home. And out of a fleet of thirty+ of them, I only ended up using two for parts - the rest got nice retirements.
One of the parts TV sets had come off the mobile truck, where it had been bolted up as the PROGRAM monitor over the sound guy's console. It bit the dust when one of the talent was driving the mobile truck and smacked it into an awning. A hole was torn through both the side of the truck and the side of the TV set. (Hint: No matter how loudly the weatherman begs to try driving the "big truck", never let him.)
The other parts TV set was just badly broken electronically (bad flyback transformer, horizontal output, damper, horiz oscillator and power supply regulator). I wasn't surprised it was dead. I was surprised that it was the *only one* that was really too far gone.
If Sony builds their computers like their TV sets (and, indeed, like most of their consumer and professional video equipment), if you treat it right, it'll last you a while.
Actually, for sustained transfers and stuff, yeah, I actually top out about 800k/sec, which is a little short of the 1.2 megs promised. But, it's rare that I get 800k/sec, too: I think that's more a factor of internet traffic than it is Velocet (dsl.ca).
The other thing, too, is that the PPPoE overhead will eat up a certain percentage of the DSL "modem"'s capacity. Doesn't PPPoE cost about 15-20%?
While PPPoE is not ideal, I really don't have much problem with them, except that their ping times seem to be high. When I do a traceroute, it seems to me that it takes a huge number of hops to get from me to the Toronto backbone.
What the hell is reptiles.org?
[*****@proxytraceroute to slashdot.org (64.28.67.48), 30 hops max, 40 byte packets
1 trebucbet-redf1x.tor.velocet.net (204.138.59.213) 73.023 ms 62.160 ms 51. 985 ms
2 hadrian-trebucbet.tor.velocet.net (216.126.83.25) 74.320 ms 57.738 ms 60. 070 ms
3 gate.velocet.net (216.126.81.1) 62.594 ms 69.898 ms 62.918 ms
4 gw-151.reptiles.org (204.138.40.5) 64.112 ms 61.132 ms 59.473 ms
5 209.135.88.249 (209.135.88.249) 63.479 ms 61.737 ms 63.535 ms
6 209.135.96.17 (209.135.96.17) 67.638 ms 78.423 ms 67.265 ms
7 dis1-toronto63-pos7-3.in.bellnexxia.net (206.108.111.29) 79.217 ms 80.167 ms 79.363 ms
8 core1-toronto63-pos1-2.in.bellnexxia.net (206.108.98.5) 83.207 ms 80.710 m s 111.743 ms
9 bx1-chicago23-pos3-0.in.bellnexxia.net (206.108.98.42) 94.517 ms 87.950 ms 79.582 ms
10 exodus-gw.bx1-chicago23-pos7-3.in.bellnexxia.net (206.108.108.250) 79.043 m s 160.032 ms 150.868 ms
11 bbr02-g2-0.okbr01.exodus.net (216.34.183.98) 119.095 ms 101.186 ms 115.64 7 ms
12 bbr01-p5-0.wlhm01.exodus.net (216.32.132.210) 150.731 ms 132.936 ms 103.2 58 ms
13 dcr04-g1-0.wlhm01.exodus.net (64.14.70.50) 103.193 ms 104.853 ms 107.543 ms
14 64.14.80.146 (64.14.80.146) 114.489 ms 133.506 ms 143.776 ms
15 64.28.66.203 (64.28.66.203) 134.878 ms 138.133 ms 126.927 ms
16 slashdot.org (64.28.67.48) 123.078 ms 116.882 ms 131.026 ms
I'm not a gamer; high ping times aren't really much of a problem, because the sustained data transfer rates are consistently great.
What happens if I choose not to use your high-performance proxy or I'm serving (uploading) off my ADSL connection? If you do not wish to use our proxy and/or are serving off your ADSL connection (i.e. uploading), we offer 5 Gigs of download/upload data transfer monthly at no cost. This averages out to 250 Megs per day. Even with a fairly popular website hosted on your ADSL connection, you will not come close to exceeding that. Should you exceed your 5 Gig free, we charge you what we pay for additional bandwidth: $10.00 a month per additional Gig."Notice that they're the only high speed consumer ISP I've ever seen that says, "Sure, you can run a website off your DSL connection".
I agree, I'd prefer to not be asked to use their proxy server. In fact, I don't. But I can also understand that bandwidth costs money, and that if Yahoo, etc, is cached locally, they can provide everything with no problems to the average user.
But remember, 5 gigs a month really is a hell of a lot of information. Unless you're talking about the overhead of leaving Gnutella running. <grin>
False advertising? You have to wonder about anybody who engages in misleading [and IMHO false] advertising that dsl.ca is doing.No more so that any DSL provider talking about the security and speed of an individual connection, versus that of a shared connection a-la cable. Gimme a break. Everything on the Internet is an exercise in shared bandwidth.
@Home and Sympatico HSE specifically forbid servers. Now, could they ban me because some versions of ICQ actually include a little webserver? Bet your ass they could. Could they eventually turn me off because Napster is a server? How about my own personal goals of running Apache and stuff? Of the three high speed ISPs available in my location (Toronto) at the time, as they would have cost me, they were as follows:
Rogers@Home: $50/mo (I don't have cable TV). DHCP. No servers allowed. 5 POP3 mailboxes. Small hosted site.
Sympatico HSE: $40/mo. DHCP with PPPoE. No servers allowed. 3? POP3 mailboxes. Small hosted site. All aspects of their service are unreliable (from what www.sympaticousers.org was saying at the time)
dsl.ca: $40/mo. DHCP with PPPoE, static IP option. Servers allowed. 5 gigs/mo cap before extra charges. Web e-mail accounts included, POP3 available at extra cost (Yahoo offers free POP3). Service seems to be stable and reliable, with little speed brownouts every now and then (usually late at night); apparently the Bell loop cards and lines aren't the items that make Bell Sympatico HSE unreliable, since dsl.ca uses them, too.
look.ca: Not really a high speed ISP at the time, since their upstream is through a dial-up connection. Part of the attraction of a high speed ISP is the always-on connection. Besides, $40/mo (I don't get Look TV service), no servers allowed, requires my phone line, slow uplink, no static IP, weird hardware reminiscent of a unidirectional cable modem attached to a flat microwave antenna on my house. Oh yeah, and they have an idle cutout of 5 minutes, and a busy cutout(!) of six hours, where they disconnect you halfway through downloading a big file.
dsl.ca just seems to be more geek-friendly than most high speed consumer ISPs. And that's mostly why I'm with them.
LOL Nothing directly, of course.
The DSL connection is made when Linux boots.
The DSL connection is not automatically reconnected if it goes down. (I just haven't gotten around to creating the scripts.)
I haven't paid the extra $5/mo for a static IP yet, mostly because I still want the ability to log off and get a new IP address if I think someone has cracked my box. (I'm not new to using a *NIX system, just new to being root.)
The uptime display there came from telnetting (bad, I know, but I never do it as root, and my passwords are all huge and ugly) into my box, and using copy and paste to put it into a message. The DSL connection must still be up for that to work, and has been up since the computer was last booted. No interruptions, and, in fact, no IP changes, either.
Of course, I could just type "adsl-start" to restart my DSL connection if it went down, but I doubt that would work through telnet... you'll have to take my word for this (note, of course, that my IP address and username are hidden):
Last login: Mon Aug 14 15:12:32 from mail1.litton-marine.comYou have mail.
[*****@proxy *****]$ uptime
5:07pm up 20 days, 16:52, 1 user, load average: 0.00, 0.00, 0.00
[*****@proxy *****]$ cd
[*****@proxy
adsl-status: Link is up and running on interface ppp0
ppp0 Link encap:Point-to-Point Protocol
inet addr:204.138.***.*** P-t-P:204.138.***.1 Mask:255.255.255.255
UP POINTOPOINT RUNNING NOARP MULTICAST MTU:1450 Metric:1
RX packets:1666960 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
TX packets:1175240 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
collisions:0 txqueuelen:10
[*****@proxy
Yeah. Most of the people I know in Toronto and Ottawa who are on either Shaw@Home or Rogers@Home are very happy with their service. Friends in Niagara Falls NY on Adelphia's unidirectional cable system love that, too, even piped into their LAN. It's worth noting that one of those friends actually works as a sales rep for Bell Atlantic DSL.
And, @Home sucks. Is ADSL any better?Okay. Well, I've never had cable internet service.
My decision went as follows:
dsl.ca is a division of Velocet. They offer their DSL service only in Toronto at the moment. $34.95/mo + $5/mo modem rental (okay, no cheaper than Sympatico). But for an extra $5/mo, they'll rent a static IP. Installation went like a million bucks. PPPoE is the only downside, but even so, Roaring Penguin's PPPoE solution is great.
Many people complain about the stability of DSL connections. I have no concerns:
2:37pm up 20 days, 14:21, 1 user, load average: 0.13, 0.03, 0.0155 processes: 54 sleeping, 1 running, 0 zombie, 0 stopped
CPU states: 0.7% user, 1.3% system, 0.0% nice, 97.8% idle
My PPPoE-based DSL connection is started up when my computer starts up. Most of that CPU load is actually top, then there's a bit from the PPPoE client. Even with all 5 computers on my home LAN streaming Real Video from the Big Brother website, the PPPoE client never gets about 2.5% or so CPU useage. (Pentium 133 with 32 megs RAM.)
If you're in Toronto, look into dsl.ca if you want a cable/Sympatico alternative. I love these guys.
Well, that's one more pacemaker for the rest of us.
Not true. Not true at all.
First off, I've read a couple of your other posts, and I do have to indicate that as far as Christians go, I have to commend you for being relatively unobjectionable.
Since you appear to be one of the few people I have ever encountered who identifies both as a Christian, and then actually appears to "live and let live", you are a special individual.
I must assure you, though, having a Baptist family living next door and a Catholic church across the street, Christianity is a family of religions that seems to promote even less tolerance and freedom of opinion than even Islam.
Well you know, back in the Roman Empire, we were rounded up and fed to lions. (Hey if everyone else is so focused on long past persecutions I'll join them)Don't even go there. More wars, violent deaths, and tortures have occurred on the basis of Christianity than all the other religions of the world have caused.
While a few thousand people were turned to Colisseum Cat Chow for the entertainment of the Romans, things did change shortly after that.
The fall of the Roman Empire gave rise to one even more dangerous and more powerful: The Roman Catholic Empire.
Throughout the middle ages, Jews, Wiccans and people of other religious denominations that have predated Christianity by millenia were persecuted, forced to convert, and if they didn't, were killed off by the thousands.
It continued for a long time after that: Ever hear of the Spanish Inquisition? The Salem Witch Trials? Hell, at Salem, you didn't even have to be a Wiccan to be burned as a witch.
And then, Christian vs. Christian bloodshed runs rampant in the world today. My own family is from Northern Ireland, and when I was a child, my own grandfather used to tell me stories about how he used to shoot Catholics for fun. How different are Catholics and Protestants? How different can they be? Don't they share the same god?
To this day, Christians are the most intolerant people in the world. Middle of the road average-Joe Christians are programmed by the church to think homosexuals are going to hell. There's enough evidence now that Helen Keller could see that gay people are a normal part of the population. And yet Christianity drives thousands of gay teenagers to kill themselves every year, because of their "abnormal lifestyle". I think every red-blooded man can agree that there is no lifestyle more abnormal than celibacy, and yet the Catholic Church demands that of their priests. Little hypocrisy, anyone?
Even more hypocrisy: Doesn't the bible tell us that God doesn't like it when we worship other deities? Isn't Christianity, which is basically the worship of a dead carpenter named Jesus Christ, completely ignoring that? Or, because it's His Son, does that make it okay? Add to that the Catholic affinity for the Virgin (ie. didn't get caught in the bushes with Joseph's brother) Mary and all the Saints just add to the mess? And when people bow to the Pope, aren't they worshipping him? Christianity seems to be, in reality, about as polythiestic as the Pagan religion of the Vikings, or as those of the ancient Greco-Roman peoples.
So, forgive me for calling you on your little blurb about how many Christians died during the Roman Empire. Perhaps if we finally threw off the shackles of organized religion and tried just being nice to each other, humanity could enjoy a far greater standard of living.
Come the afterlife, if there is one, I'm sure that I'll be okay. If God is rejecting people from Heaven because they're Jewish instead of Baptist or Hindu because instead of Catholic, the crapshoot is so great that you'd never know what religion to believe in order to be allowed in. In other words, ask to be buried in Bermuda shorts. Or, better still, get cremated to help acclimatize yourself. But, if there is a God, I have faith that He would be more concerned about what kind of life you led, not who/how you worshipped.
Yeah. I've got RH6.2, and while I've installed it on probably half a dozen machines around the office now, I still haven't installed it on one with a sound card yet.
I do, however, know that RH6.2's installer is a lot more advanced than RH6's; so it wouldn't surprise me if sound detection has been added.
But, this is all beside the point.
We're familiar enough with Linux and with computers in general that we think nothing of joining in a discussion board where most of us type our replies in HTML.
We take it for granted that we'll be able to figure out how to use a new application or toss a new piece of hardware at our computers and make it work.
Linux embodies that. It's been said before, and I will say it again: it's the operating system by computer geeks and for computer geeks.
AOL's interface is the epitome of dumbed-down for the masses, and it's in such stark contrast to the intimidating power of the Linux system that combining the two feels like a travesty.
My concern never was literally that AOL users would end up using vi, because I don't think that's physically possible. Nor do I expect that they'd ever have to manually configure a sound card - let's face it, AOL's interest is only in creating closed internet appliances.
Now, you can't tell me that the image of an AOL user slugging it out with vi and the contents of his /etc/ directory doesn't make you want to fall over laughing?
RedHat 6.0, circa November 1999, on a Dell Optiplex GL-5133 (Pentium 133) with a genuine SoundBlaster 16.
conf.modules was my friend. And so was vi, which I voluntarily use over pico or emacs, mostly because when I got my first internet access in 1988, that was the only text editor available to me at shell. And therefore, nebulous and clumsy as it is, I know it well.
Urk.
Configuring sound in Linux is a new priority.
I mean, how will all the AOLers know they have new mail if they don't hear the "You've Got Mail!" message?
Assuming a kernel recompile isn't required, can you imagine that process?
I'd pay money to see an AOL user opening up /etc/conf.modules with vi:
"Remember, you can save your changes and exit very easily. Hit Escape, then colon, then 'wq!' It's very intuitive. You'll like it."
So easy to use, no wonder it's number one!
Question: Does the FBI Training Academy count as a university?
Remember, way back when, the simple complexity (!) of computers was enough to keep the idiots at bay. Hell, most of 'em couldn't even turn the damned things on.
Today, sadly, that has changed. The death of computing as being synonymous with intelligence is upon us.
<BigBlockMopar starts playing an MP3 of Taps.>
Sure, that's absolutely great if you're building a Hewlett-Packard Pavillion that you're going to sell in quantity through all the Fry's and Circuit Citys.
But, let's face it, how many of these servers is VA Linux really going to sell? A couple of hundred before they make a change that makes the video obsolete?
When you then divide the production costs of the video by the total number of machines you expect to sell to which the video will apply, what are the final costs per machine? How practical is this? Not very, is my guess.
How are you going to distribute this? VHS videocassette? That's expensive. A CD is a lot cheaper, especially if your computer is going to have a CD-ROM drive.
But how is the video going to help those really basic users who don't even know how to plug the monitor into the video card, let alone start up the machine, toss in a CD-ROM and let Windows autorun it?
How long will more advanced users stick with the video, if it starts out explaining to beginners that the CD-ROM drive is not a cupholder?
This is a problem that lacks an easy solution.
Forget their money. I want nana's cherry old rust-free low-mileage 1974 Plymouth Scamp.
(Let's face it, Florida's roads will be safer if she takes the bus to bingo instead. Scamp vs. Honda = slightly dented Scamp, completely flattened Honda.)
Up here in Toronto, I live in a three-bedroom 2-bath house on a big main street and right beside a housing project (gunshots and Acuras with loud stereos all night). Despite that, it's valued at over $279,000 CDN. And that doesn't include the snowblower I need to get into and out of the driveway for five months of the year.
$100k. Wow.
In most counties, your 'homestead' is protected in bankruptcy proceedings - scam artists can hang on to land and buildings up to $1 million when their schemes unravel.Mega-wow. Of course, that's only meant to promote legitimate enterpreneurs. Sure.
No state income tax, so add 6% to your take-home.Wow.
The weather is nice if you like Turkish baths and lightning). We have beaches where the water is warm.Yeah, I've gotta say, I've been to Florida a couple of times, and I love the climate. Both times were in August, both times I felt right at home in the sweltering heat and humidity. (I like being too hot more than being too cold.)
And what snake-oil salesman wouldn't feel at home with alligators in his backyard??Yeah, and he gets to crush all the smaller reptiles that always seem to be underfoot there.
Now, I understand. Thank you.
You know, just after I clicked submit on that last post, I thought of something about Microsoft's tech support.
I've watched users pull out their per-minute M$ tech support 1-900 phone numbers, and be prompted over the phone to make all sorts of system settings changes. Which, as anyone who has ever touched a Windows box knows, will require a reboot.
Perhaps the reason that Windows doesn't let you restart processes without having to reboot the computer is so that M$ can force tech support customers to stay on the phone longer, thus generating more revenues?
Think about it. If the average Windows 9x/ME box takes 3 minutes to reboot and in the course of a tech support call has to be rebooted 3 times (probably not far off), that's nine more billable minutes. How much is a billable minute? How many Windows users call M$'s tech support?
Scary. I'd never thought of that before...
Maybe the reason VA Linux has a policy against installing Mandrake is because they know it lacks the support for their hardware...
Seriously, you aren't asking netscape to provide support for windows either.I'm sure people call them all the time, wondering why their modem isn't working ("because I need the modem to use Netscape, it must be Netscape's responsibility") or many other Windows-related problems that the inept may assume are an application's fault. Hey, if you're charging for tech support on a per-incident basis, Windows-related problems must be a gravy train for Netscape's tech support revenues.
<grin>
Remember that today's computer companies often make tiny margins on their sales.
Remember also that computers are complicated things, regardless of the operating system being used. Users will always call up with stupid, basic questions, wasting the tech support time (and therefore budgets).
In a stint where I did a lot of help desk tech support, I'd often get stupid questions about why is the monitor still black (turn it on), why doesn't the RAM I bought fit into the computer (I later found out the guy was trying to stuff it into the floppy disk drive but that thought *never* crossed my mind when I was on the phone with him, killing an hour of phone time), your computer must be broken because I can't get Yahoo to work (Failed to Connect error - the guy didn't even have a modem, let alone an internet account anywhere). Granted, with a rack-mounted Linux server, the questions will be a lot less basic, but still equally stupid to anyone really familiar with Linux. These will *hog* tech support time and dollars.
Customer service has had to become a thing of the past, unless you're willing to call the helpful 1-900 number or fork out your Visa on a per-incident basis.
That's the way it is and will be for the forseeable future. Unless you're in women's fashions, where the markup is often well over 100% and the number of possible tech support questions related to the newly redesigned belt buckle and zipper are limited.
It's simply not built into the cost of the sale anymore. It's a good thing, too - if it were, an el-cheapo Celeron could run way over $3,000.
Actually, I'd liken it more to stickers with ads stuck to the pages of the library books.
Obscuring the text you're wanting to read, you'd have to peel the stickers off the pages (and occasionally lift the text you want to read with them) before you could actually make such a defaced book useful again.
I'm sure that legitimate Gnutella sharing servers will still be in there somewhere, but I really don't like the looks of the future Gnutella if this system is allowed to survive.
Imagine getting 100+ responses to every search, 96 of each responses being from spam. It would take forever to find anything, effectively killing Gnutella's usefulness.
Perhaps the RIAA/MPAA had something to do with this?
I suggest we take steps to destroy it now. Anyone have an offshore ISP that is immune to legal action from yanking Sharezilla's website?
Man, oh man, if only I were in high school again. I beat the snot out of a kid who was tearing the pages out of books because he was too cheap to use the photocopier. (I was a bit of an unorthodox library geek back then, and while I was also an autoshop grease-monkey and an electronics lab terror, I've always loved books.) Anyone who assumes that nerds are placid sheep is an idiot. I see a wonderful parallel here... do any Slashdotters have nothing to lose?