Truly, a very fine champagne style wine is produced by the Summerhill Estate Winery in Kelowna, British Columbia. Their secret is to age the wine under a carefully constructed pyramid so that "all the atoms spin the same direction".
"The site was carefully chosen. First a check of interfering energies was exhausted (i.e. underground streams, electric current exposure, gas line interference, etc.). Then the earth under the pyramid was compacted to 100%. Then a surveyor lined up the square base to coincide with exact True North as it is here in Kelowna. The area was then checked by an astronomer who lines up the foundation to the North Star precisely. It is interesting to note that much excitement took place when we aligned the site because the astronomer's news that almost to the day, 1997 was "the year of the Great Pyramid"."
"The pyramid effectiveness may also be explained using Einstein's concept of Tachyons and Tardyons. Tachyons are particles of invisible energy that move faster than the speed of light (that means it is faster than 186,282 miles per second). Tardyons behave in the opposite way, moving below or at the speed of light. This brings about the theory of negative space-time. [Negative space-time is 180 degrees from positive space-time. In positive space-time living organisms change from life to deterioration. In negative space-time, life moves from deterioration to rejuvenation. It is said that the pyramid serves as the interface between positive and negative space-time."
Scoff if you wish, but they make some very, very fine wine.
Replicating a crummy business on-line won't be enough. The successful companies will be those that harness new technology in ways that make the customer experience more pleasant.
If three or four businesses will sell me a widget on-line, I'll stick with the one that can offer three features.
Response by real live people. When I have a question I do not want to waste ten minutes trying to find contact information on a website. I don't want to use webforms that try to tell you that you can only have "approved" topics. Instead I want an e-mail link that goes to a real live human being.
It's not that I mind an automated response, but it should show some relationship to my e-mail. Some companies can do that well, but many cannot. If my e-mail tells you that I've already tried the solution on your website, the I do not want an automated response telling to check your website before calling.
Especially one that says "DO NOT REPLY TO THIS E-MAIL".
I want your website to have truthful information about what is in stock. I cannot imagine why any retailer would buy an on-line sales system that didn't also track inventory. I don't order anything that is on back order, and if your website can't tell me if it's in stock, I just go away.
Finally, a successful Internet business model is one that recognizes that on the 'Net business is global. I am astonished by the number of companies who seem to have no interest on the bulk of the human population that lives outside of the U.S. In particular those who seem to have not noticed the 30 million potential customers in Canada.
Your on-line business model should plan from the beginning to handle currencies, shipping, and languages from all over the globe. To do otherwise is to cut yourself off from some very large markets.
Your company may be located in Peoria, but people from all over the globe can access your website. Why wouldn't you want to sell to them??
Who on earth posted this?? "The ubiquity of the iPod"? Where? Just because Macheads are gobbling the things up doesn't make it "ubiquitous" except within Mac circles. One can argue that cheapo MP3 players are far more "ubiquitous" than anything that Apple sells.
"The return of the Mac"? Does that mean 4.1% of market share instead of 4.05%?
Memory sticks as life changing? Sheesh - if my life was that pathetic I'd find a new life or take up raising sea monkeys.
All in all this is about the most pathetic list I've seen yet. But then I haven't looked at the other four or five that were posted last night...
If there's one technological move that scares the bejeezus out of me it's the US government's rapid deployment of intrusive technology to monitor individuals, or to track their movements and actions.
Whether it's Patriot Two, and the far reaching powers that it gives government agencies to snoop at just about anything you can think of in your life, or the fingerprinting and scanning of people entering or leaving the country, or the increasing use of things like EZ_Pass by law enforcement, it seems that overall this is probably the worst abuse of technology that we can imagine.
Add to these the powers given to corporate interests by things like the DMCA, and it seems that technology is being used to strip away many, many fundamental rights that we should enjoy as citizens.
Hmmm... or more accurately, many manufacturers would like you to believe that the less expensive batteries sold by other companies are somehow hazardous to your health.
Sure I'm not going to buy a battery from a guy on a street corner, but neither do I believe that an aftermarket item is necessarily inferior to the manufacturer's version. Often they come out of the same factory.
Look for used HP printer. Ours is a 5P which just goes and goes and goes. It's probably the one bit of technology here that hasn't been upgraded, replaced, or even cleaned in the last five years. Needless to say, every OS since the C64 seems to support it out of the box.
Cel phone service by satellite - how could it lose? Seamless coverage everywhere on the globe.
Turned out that after launching 72 Iridium satellites Motorola found themselves very broke.
Is it possible that Sirius and XM will find the same thing - that the demand for pay as you go radio is significantly less than hoped? 1.2 million subscribers is a pretty small base to support the kind of technology they need.
We still have a trusty old thermal paper fax machine. We added it after several years of fax modem only. The reason was the difficulty in getting WinFax and the faxmodem to handle Identi-Call rings reliably. (After going DSL it made no sense to maintain a second data/fax phone line).
Since then we have come to realize that everyone has access to a fax of some sort, even people that lack or don't understand e-mail and more advanced technology. If nothing else they can walk down to the corner store and fax us something.
The other realization is that fax maintains the design or layout of what you're sending without relying on HTML e-mail, attachments, or the sometimes slim odds of your recipient having the same software that you do.
Aside from that, any piece of paper, even fax peper, holds more weight and seems more legitimate than an e-mail.
For the last couple of decades a culture has been nurtured which is founded on the idea that those with money will win over those who don't. And it can be argued today that those with the most money are also the ones that make the rules (like the DMCA, like the stupid camcorder ban).
What the RIAA, MPAA and their ilk have been assuming is that their considerable wealth will still allow them to bully anyone who doesn't follow their rules.
If they were battling some monolithic entity - say a company churning out thousands of bootleg copies of LOTR each month - they might be right. They could sue them and shut them down.
The problem is that they instead are battling hundreds of thousands of tiny operators in dozens of countries. They are battling hundreds of clever programmers who don't really care about the money, preferring instead to be one more nail in the coffin of the multinationals.
As Napster begat Gnutella begat Freenet, we can reasonably expect a fast, easy to use and totally secure P2P network to evolve very soon. And if that is defeated, we can expect a successor.
What could have been a simple marketing challenge has evolved into a near guerilla war.
What the music companies have not understood is that it is very, very hard to defeat a guerilla force, especially one that has widespread popular support.
Of course the ultimate absurdity is that they could have stopped this dead in its tracks. Maybe three in five MP3s that I have downloaded were of decent quality, or complete, or even the song they were titled.
A buck a tune is still too much to pay for a file that comes hindered with all the current DRM restrictions. If I could buy an un-crippled copy of a tune for 25 or 50 cents I would never waste my time messing with Kazaa or any other P2P client.
You can laugh at anti-bubbles, but some very fine wine is made by the Summerhill Estate Winery in British Columbia. Their secret, they swear, is that it is aged under a pyramid so that "all the atoms spin in the same direction".
Lord, this arcane bickering seems pointless. From my reading Perens' goal is to develop a distro that "just works" for the average corporate user.
I just wrapped up my semi-annual "download a linux distro and see if the damned thing will work" exercise, and once again I'm falling back on Win2K, which does everthing that I need, and does it with a minimum of BS.
Over the last few years I've tried RedHat, Mandrake, and a half dozen other distros, on both bare machines and dual boot systems. In every case I hit the wall when trying to implement some simple or essential feature. Every time I found myself led into that arcane and recursive hell known as man pages and how-tos. (and mailing lists, and discussion groups and...)
I'm good with hardware, and can make Windows do anything I need. I have managed to troubleshoot some exceedingly obscure problems in the past. Still, once again I've abandoned Linux because I can't afford to invest weeks of obscure research just to do day to day work.
I really want to be rid of Microsoft products. I find them more irritating than useful, and surely don't like MS' business practices.
I love OpenOffice and have pretty much abandoned MS Office. I like Mozilla, and use a wide variety of freeware and open source products.
I would in a minute abandon MS Windows if it were practical, but to do that I need a distro that will do what Windows does:
Find and configure all my hardware, set up internet access and networking to allow all of the computers on our system to share files, and easily allow others to use the printers attached to my PC, easily set up my two video cards and monitors, set up to sync my PalmPilot.
And have decent looking fonts.
So far every distro I have tried has blown at least two of these basic goals and has offered no easy way to achieve them.
Again, I cannot afford to spend days or weeks tracking down the obscure solution to make something like HotSync work.
It does not matter to me whether this happens with GNOME or KDE. If I can boot from CD and have all of these things come up working, I'll buy it.
If including only GNOME allows Perens' the time to make a truly reliable installer, then I'm for it.
Before posting I tripped over to the Internet Movie Database and looked at what has been released. I realized that there had been almost nothing that was sufficiently interesting to get me to watch.
The one film that REALLY stood out was a 2002 release, The Hours. Even Nicole Kidman impressed me.
Face it - Hollywood has lost all interest in making good films.
Honestly, why not start 'em with a digital camera? They can bang off hundreds of pix with no cost while they learn basic composition and not spend hundreds of dollars processing bad pictures.
Once they've mastered basic photography you can move them up to a "real" camera.
I would love to know how many Win98 boxes are still churning away happily. There must be millions of them whose owners haven't found a reason to change.
For those people, Win98SE, with Office or even Works, is just what they need. Fast enough, flexible enough, and if they manage to stay free of spyware, reliable enough.
Since most of these people never bother with updates and patches (I mean, who would with a 28.8 modem?) Microsoft's move will mean nothing to them.
I'd suggest that Sun has been building something pretty serious, one careful step at a time.
In order to challenge Microsoft they need to see some other OS on PCs. On a practical level it doesn't matter what OS, as long as it's not Windows.
But as noted, it's applications that drive PC purchases, not the OS. So what has Sun done?
Purchased StarOffice, spun off OpenOffice, and this week added support for the latter. For 95% of people the Sun office suites will handle anything that they want to do, as well as saving in MS compatible formats. It may not be perfect, but it's certainly Good enough. Better than MS Works in any event.
Add Mozilla and maybe Evolution for e-mail and you've covered the bulk of most people's activities.
So Sun can offer a non-Windows OS, a non-Windows software package. Bundle the new PC with a printer and Monitor, maybe a scanner, and you have a complete package that will suit most folks. If it does these things, and maybe connects with their digital camera, then they don't care about OSs and Application names.
The only thing left is marketing. Sell a similar box to say a fraction of the population of China and your per unit costs drop fast. Fast enough that you can also sell to WalMart, make a profit, and allow them to undercut other retailers.
Sure, there will be some problems supporting software and other hardware, but It still looks to me like Sun has a good chance of starting to eat into Microsoft's market share.
In this case, to avoid paying Google for an Ad Word fee, they spend piles of money and time setting up cross-linking websites hoping to "beat the system".
Hmmm - isn't that the way that/.ers solve most problems?.....
Hmmm. The sheer lack of details on their website makes it hard to tell just what they're offering. Certainly what passes for technical advice in terms of actually broadcasting a radio signal suggests that they don't know one heck of a lot.
Basically your $2,495 World Vibrations Radio Station is a box that plays audio. Nothing more. As far as I can tell there's nothing here that you couldn't do just as well with an off the shelf PC. In any event you still need the mixer, speakers, mics, playback equipment, processing, and transmitter that aren't included with the WVRS.
There's one heck of a lot more to a radio station than playing MP3s off of a computer!
Now that we have established that a sufficiently clever virus can spread rapidly enough to beat the Symantecs of the world, we should be worrying about what this technology can be used for.
Think about some of the things that hard core political organizations could do to their opponents? Think about corporate whistlebowers who could make sure that their secrets hit hundreds of thousands of computer screens in hours or days. Think about someone who sends something as virulent as last month's "Microsoft Support" virus, but with a nasty payload that wipes the user's hard drive.
Or perhaps, think about using viruses as a tool to rapidly spread secret or patent protected information for widespread use without royalties.
All in all, I think that at twenty years we're just seeing the tip of the iceberg. One of these days someone with imagination is going to do something large, fast spreading, and so far unimagined.
> Imagine what would happen if Google were to vanish > tomorrow. It would drastically reduce productivity
Hmmm... given that any Google search leads to the average user checking out twenty-seven links, eight of which had nothing to do with the original query, losing Google might actually improve productivity.
Just spent way too much time clearing dreck of my B-in-law's laptop (...it used to be faster... ). The highlight was running Ad-Aware and finding some 48 different bits of Comet Cursor that it removed.
Some really bad experiences in Appalachian Kentucky taught me that any of the on-line maps have serious deficiencies. Since that time I'll use them for general driving directions and estimated travel times, but I always follow up with a visit to the local CAA (AAA in the U.S.) for a good old paper road map.
Slashdot Mirror
Truly, a very fine champagne style wine is produced by the Summerhill Estate Winery in Kelowna, British Columbia. Their secret is to age the wine under a carefully constructed pyramid so that "all the atoms spin the same direction".
"The site was carefully chosen. First a check of interfering energies was exhausted (i.e. underground streams, electric current exposure, gas line interference, etc.). Then the earth under the pyramid was compacted to 100%. Then a surveyor lined up the square base to coincide with exact True North as it is here in Kelowna. The area was then checked by an astronomer who lines up the foundation to the North Star precisely. It is interesting to note that much excitement took place when we aligned the site because the astronomer's news that almost to the day, 1997 was "the year of the Great Pyramid"."
"The pyramid effectiveness may also be explained using Einstein's concept of Tachyons and Tardyons. Tachyons are particles of invisible energy that move faster than the speed of light (that means it is faster than 186,282 miles per second). Tardyons behave in the opposite way, moving below or at the speed of light. This brings about the theory of negative space-time. [Negative space-time is 180 degrees from positive space-time. In positive space-time living organisms change from life to deterioration. In negative space-time, life moves from deterioration to rejuvenation. It is said that the pyramid serves as the interface between positive and negative space-time."
Scoff if you wish, but they make some very, very fine wine.
Replicating a crummy business on-line won't be enough. The successful companies will be those that harness new technology in ways that make the customer experience more pleasant.
If three or four businesses will sell me a widget on-line, I'll stick with the one that can offer three features.
Response by real live people. When I have a question I do not want to waste ten minutes trying to find contact information on a website. I don't want to use webforms that try to tell you that you can only have "approved" topics. Instead I want an e-mail link that goes to a real live human being.
It's not that I mind an automated response, but it should show some relationship to my e-mail. Some companies can do that well, but many cannot. If my e-mail tells you that I've already tried the solution on your website, the I do not want an automated response telling to check your website before calling.
Especially one that says "DO NOT REPLY TO THIS E-MAIL".
I want your website to have truthful information about what is in stock. I cannot imagine why any retailer would buy an on-line sales system that didn't also track inventory. I don't order anything that is on back order, and if your website can't tell me if it's in stock, I just go away.
Finally, a successful Internet business model is one that recognizes that on the 'Net business is global. I am astonished by the number of companies who seem to have no interest on the bulk of the human population that lives outside of the U.S. In particular those who seem to have not noticed the 30 million potential customers in Canada.
Your on-line business model should plan from the beginning to handle currencies, shipping, and languages from all over the globe. To do otherwise is to cut yourself off from some very large markets.
Your company may be located in Peoria, but people from all over the globe can access your website. Why wouldn't you want to sell to them??
Who on earth posted this?? "The ubiquity of the iPod"? Where? Just because Macheads are gobbling the things up doesn't make it "ubiquitous" except within Mac circles. One can argue that cheapo MP3 players are far more "ubiquitous" than anything that Apple sells.
"The return of the Mac"? Does that mean 4.1% of market share instead of 4.05%?
Memory sticks as life changing? Sheesh - if my life was that pathetic I'd find a new life or take up raising sea monkeys.
All in all this is about the most pathetic list I've seen yet. But then I haven't looked at the other four or five that were posted last night...
If there's one technological move that scares the bejeezus out of me it's the US government's rapid deployment of intrusive technology to monitor individuals, or to track their movements and actions.
Whether it's Patriot Two, and the far reaching powers that it gives government agencies to snoop at just about anything you can think of in your life, or the fingerprinting and scanning of people entering or leaving the country, or the increasing use of things like EZ_Pass by law enforcement, it seems that overall this is probably the worst abuse of technology that we can imagine.
Add to these the powers given to corporate interests by things like the DMCA, and it seems that technology is being used to strip away many, many fundamental rights that we should enjoy as citizens.
Hmmm... or more accurately, many manufacturers would like you to believe that the less expensive batteries sold by other companies are somehow hazardous to your health.
Sure I'm not going to buy a battery from a guy on a street corner, but neither do I believe that an aftermarket item is necessarily inferior to the manufacturer's version. Often they come out of the same factory.
Look for used HP printer. Ours is a 5P which just goes and goes and goes. It's probably the one bit of technology here that hasn't been upgraded, replaced, or even cleaned in the last five years. Needless to say, every OS since the C64 seems to support it out of the box.
Cel phone service by satellite - how could it lose? Seamless coverage everywhere on the globe.
Turned out that after launching 72 Iridium satellites Motorola found themselves very broke.
Is it possible that Sirius and XM will find the same thing - that the demand for pay as you go radio is significantly less than hoped? 1.2 million subscribers is a pretty small base to support the kind of technology they need.
We still have a trusty old thermal paper fax machine. We added it after several years of fax modem only. The reason was the difficulty in getting WinFax and the faxmodem to handle Identi-Call rings reliably. (After going DSL it made no sense to maintain a second data/fax phone line).
Since then we have come to realize that everyone has access to a fax of some sort, even people that lack or don't understand e-mail and more advanced technology. If nothing else they can walk down to the corner store and fax us something.
The other realization is that fax maintains the design or layout of what you're sending without relying on HTML e-mail, attachments, or the sometimes slim odds of your recipient having the same software that you do.
Aside from that, any piece of paper, even fax peper, holds more weight and seems more legitimate than an e-mail.
Fearless, you have summed things up very well.
For the last couple of decades a culture has been nurtured which is founded on the idea that those with money will win over those who don't. And it can be argued today that those with the most money are also the ones that make the rules (like the DMCA, like the stupid camcorder ban).
What the RIAA, MPAA and their ilk have been assuming is that their considerable wealth will still allow them to bully anyone who doesn't follow their rules.
If they were battling some monolithic entity - say a company churning out thousands of bootleg copies of LOTR each month - they might be right. They could sue them and shut them down.
The problem is that they instead are battling hundreds of thousands of tiny operators in dozens of countries. They are battling hundreds of clever programmers who don't really care about the money, preferring instead to be one more nail in the coffin of the multinationals.
As Napster begat Gnutella begat Freenet, we can reasonably expect a fast, easy to use and totally secure P2P network to evolve very soon. And if that is defeated, we can expect a successor.
What could have been a simple marketing challenge has evolved into a near guerilla war.
What the music companies have not understood is that it is very, very hard to defeat a guerilla force, especially one that has widespread popular support.
Of course the ultimate absurdity is that they could have stopped this dead in its tracks. Maybe three in five MP3s that I have downloaded were of decent quality, or complete, or even the song they were titled.
A buck a tune is still too much to pay for a file that comes hindered with all the current DRM restrictions. If I could buy an un-crippled copy of a tune for 25 or 50 cents I would never waste my time messing with Kazaa or any other P2P client.
You can laugh at anti-bubbles, but some very fine wine is made by the Summerhill Estate Winery in British Columbia. Their secret, they swear, is that it is aged under a pyramid so that "all the atoms spin in the same direction".
Lord, this arcane bickering seems pointless. From my reading Perens' goal is to develop a distro that "just works" for the average corporate user.
I just wrapped up my semi-annual "download a linux distro and see if the damned thing will work" exercise, and once again I'm falling back on Win2K, which does everthing that I need, and does it with a minimum of BS.
Over the last few years I've tried RedHat, Mandrake, and a half dozen other distros, on both bare machines and dual boot systems. In every case I hit the wall when trying to implement some simple or essential feature. Every time I found myself led into that arcane and recursive hell known as man pages and how-tos. (and mailing lists, and discussion groups and...)
I'm good with hardware, and can make Windows do anything I need. I have managed to troubleshoot some exceedingly obscure problems in the past. Still, once again I've abandoned Linux because I can't afford to invest weeks of obscure research just to do day to day work.
I really want to be rid of Microsoft products. I find them more irritating than useful, and surely don't like MS' business practices.
I love OpenOffice and have pretty much abandoned MS Office. I like Mozilla, and use a wide variety of freeware and open source products.
I would in a minute abandon MS Windows if it were practical, but to do that I need a distro that will do what Windows does:
Find and configure all my hardware, set up internet access and networking to allow all of the computers on our system to share files, and easily allow others to use the printers attached to my PC, easily set up my two video cards and monitors, set up to sync my PalmPilot.
And have decent looking fonts.
So far every distro I have tried has blown at least two of these basic goals and has offered no easy way to achieve them.
Again, I cannot afford to spend days or weeks tracking down the obscure solution to make something like HotSync work.
It does not matter to me whether this happens with GNOME or KDE. If I can boot from CD and have all of these things come up working, I'll buy it.
If including only GNOME allows Perens' the time to make a truly reliable installer, then I'm for it.
Before posting I tripped over to the Internet Movie Database and looked at what has been released. I realized that there had been almost nothing that was sufficiently interesting to get me to watch.
The one film that REALLY stood out was a 2002 release, The Hours. Even Nicole Kidman impressed me.
Face it - Hollywood has lost all interest in making good films.
Honestly, why not start 'em with a digital camera? They can bang off hundreds of pix with no cost while they learn basic composition and not spend hundreds of dollars processing bad pictures.
Once they've mastered basic photography you can move them up to a "real" camera.
I would love to know how many Win98 boxes are still churning away happily. There must be millions of them whose owners haven't found a reason to change.
For those people, Win98SE, with Office or even Works, is just what they need. Fast enough, flexible enough, and if they manage to stay free of spyware, reliable enough.
Since most of these people never bother with updates and patches (I mean, who would with a 28.8 modem?) Microsoft's move will mean nothing to them.
I'd suggest that Sun has been building something pretty serious, one careful step at a time.
In order to challenge Microsoft they need to see some other OS on PCs. On a practical level it doesn't matter what OS, as long as it's not Windows.
But as noted, it's applications that drive PC purchases, not the OS. So what has Sun done?
Purchased StarOffice, spun off OpenOffice, and this week added support for the latter. For 95% of people the Sun office suites will handle anything that they want to do, as well as saving in MS compatible formats. It may not be perfect, but it's certainly Good enough. Better than MS Works in any event.
Add Mozilla and maybe Evolution for e-mail and you've covered the bulk of most people's activities.
So Sun can offer a non-Windows OS, a non-Windows software package. Bundle the new PC with a printer and Monitor, maybe a scanner, and you have a complete package that will suit most folks. If it does these things, and maybe connects with their digital camera, then they don't care about OSs and Application names.
The only thing left is marketing. Sell a similar box to say a fraction of the population of China and your per unit costs drop fast. Fast enough that you can also sell to WalMart, make a profit, and allow them to undercut other retailers.
Sure, there will be some problems supporting software and other hardware, but It still looks to me like Sun has a good chance of starting to eat into Microsoft's market share.
Barry
In this case, to avoid paying Google for an Ad Word fee, they spend piles of money and time setting up cross-linking websites hoping to "beat the system".
/.ers solve most problems?.....
Hmmm - isn't that the way that
Hmmm. The sheer lack of details on their website makes it hard to tell just what they're offering. Certainly what passes for technical advice in terms of actually broadcasting a radio signal suggests that they don't know one heck of a lot.
Basically your $2,495 World Vibrations Radio Station is a box that plays audio. Nothing more. As far as I can tell there's nothing here that you couldn't do just as well with an off the shelf PC. In any event you still need the mixer, speakers, mics, playback equipment, processing, and transmitter that aren't included with the WVRS.
There's one heck of a lot more to a radio station than playing MP3s off of a computer!
Now that we have established that a sufficiently clever virus can spread rapidly enough to beat the Symantecs of the world, we should be worrying about what this technology can be used for.
Think about some of the things that hard core political organizations could do to their opponents? Think about corporate whistlebowers who could make sure that their secrets hit hundreds of thousands of computer screens in hours or days. Think about someone who sends something as virulent as last month's "Microsoft Support" virus, but with a nasty payload that wipes the user's hard drive.
Or perhaps, think about using viruses as a tool to rapidly spread secret or patent protected information for widespread use without royalties.
All in all, I think that at twenty years we're just seeing the tip of the iceberg. One of these days someone with imagination is going to do something large, fast spreading, and so far unimagined.
> Imagine what would happen if Google were to vanish > tomorrow. It would drastically reduce productivity
Hmmm... given that any Google search leads to the average user checking out twenty-seven links, eight of which had nothing to do with the original query, losing Google might actually improve productivity.
Just spent way too much time clearing dreck of my B-in-law's laptop (...it used to be faster... ). The highlight was running Ad-Aware and finding some 48 different bits of Comet Cursor that it removed.
Ack.
Barry
Some really bad experiences in Appalachian Kentucky taught me that any of the on-line maps have serious deficiencies. Since that time I'll use them for general driving directions and estimated travel times, but I always follow up with a visit to the local CAA (AAA in the U.S.) for a good old paper road map.