If you call tech support and almost immediately ask to speak to second level support, will they escalate the call, or do they force you to go through their nonsense first?
Someone at my ISP cautioned me that, when I restarted my cable modem, I had to crawl under my desk and unplug it from the wall; I couldn't unplug the end of the cable going into the cable modem. (?!)
When I get a particularly clueless tech, can I ask to be elevated, or do I have to put up with them until I stump them?
I think ISPs should keep a record. When I tell them exactly what's wrong, and turn out to be right, they should put a star next to my name or something, designating that I have a clue. Until you've experienced it, you don't know how irritating it is to have to reconfigure your network so you're not behind a firewall/router just so they can see you were right in the first place.
There are some people who definitely need to be asked routine questions, but I'd be unbelievably happy if they'd pick up the phone and see, "Hey, this guy must know what he's talking about" and believe me when I tell them what router on their network is down.
My cable ISP, Adelphia, possibly has the worst tech support ever.
I've called before, and literally said "I'm losing packets past the third hop, [router name] in Albany. I have a link, I just can't get out onto the backbone."
She had me reboot my modem. Unsurprisgly, still didn't work. Then she wanted my IP to try to ping. After what seemed like a few hours, she concluded "Hmm... I can't get to you." Really?
Better yet, my dad somehow ended up having to explain how to the tech how she used ping.
(I'm not mentioning the 30 minute wait times, the horrible on-hold music that cuts out, or that ads for phone service that play while you're calling to report that your cable modem's down -- rather a bad time to try to sell me stuff... And the ads interrupt each other if you wait long enough, too.)
Appologies if I come off as a karma whore, or an off-topic ranter, but I wanted to make the note that "ham" is simply another term for "amateur" radio. There's much debate about where the "ham" name from.
But it doesn't stand for anything, and thus HAM isn't really correct. It's rather like the people who, unfamiliar with the term, talk about LINUX, not Linux. To those familiar with the term, and who regard caps as SHOUTING, it's rather disconcerting to have people randomly shouting "HAM!" at you.
As far as overpowering, we're allowed 1,500 Watts; I doubt more than a few exceed that.
I certainly can't speak for everyone, but most of the hams I know are genuinely concerned about interference, many to the point of coming over and diagnosing problems if desired. (I should note that more often than not, the problem is shoddily-made electronics such as TVs or radios, as opposed to the radios themselves, although it's certainly not absolute.) Rather than trying to cause interference back, perhaps you could try to talk to neighborhood hams. I bet they'd be eager and willing to rectify the problem.
And don't say ham radio would be useful in some sort of natural disaster, seeing as the internet WAS designed to withstand a nuclear attack!
The Internet as a whole will never go down. But when was the last time your Internet connection went down? Earlier today, for me, lasting an hour or two. When your town is hit by a tornado, do you really think you'll still have an Internet connection? Sure, much of the world does. But not your town, where you need the help.
Besides the emergency communication aspect, ham radio's just fun. Sure, I can e-mail someone overseas. But to talk without wires? Can you do that? I can. Sure, more people may take interest in the Internet than ham radio, but that's like saying "This Linux thing... Who needs it? Not many people use it; Windows is SOOOO much easier to add new hardware with. Surely we can just do away with Linux and let the Windows people be?" It's absurd to propose doing away with ham radio entirely.
That's really naive. Why do we still rely on cars? They're over 100 years old; haven't we moved to something more modern?
To suggest that ham radio hasn't evolved is completely ignorant. Modern ham radios sport LCDs, top-quality DSP filters to pull out signals you might not otherwise here, advanced speech compression, etc. Modern repeaters are Internet-linked; a local repeater might be linked with one in a foreign country over the Internet. It's hardly the radio Marconi knew.
Futhermore, hams are constantly coming up with new ideas. 'Back in the day,' it was a ham who invented cordless phones. (Which eventually evolved into cell phones.) Hams are constantly innovating; while some hams love nothing more than Morse code on an 'antique' radio, quite a few are also pioneering new technologies -- PSK31, for example, a remarkable digital technology usable on the HF (worldwide) bands, that uses very little bandwidth and is able to work well even with heavy interference.
Yet another factor you overlook is the role hams play in emergency communications. A TON of hams are actively involved in emergency communications. I'm hundreds of miles from New York City; on September 12th, 2001, several local hams flew out to NYC to help with emergency communications. In a testament to how many hams help, they were turned away due to the fact that they already had too many volunteers providing emergency communications.
I have a cell phone and a high-speed Internet connection. But what happens when there's an Earthquake, and the local phone lines (which the cell towers are connected to) and Internet lines are taken down? Hams have a history -- that lives on -- of providing emergency communications.
I think RFID would be far less opposed if there were legislation passed required all devices with RFID devices to bear a prominent "This object contains an RFID transmitter," along with a brief description of what this means.
Rather like how places using video cameras put "CCTV Monitoring Is In Use for Your Protection" signs up -- now you know it has RFID, and can make the decision on your own.
The people who argue that GNOME and KDE have to be standardized. I agree that I should be able to use KDE but run GNOME apps, but that's why you have libraries for both.
The people who argue that KDE and GNOME need to merge are amongst the greatest annoyances. It's just like saying "Microsoft and Linux don't play together well. They should be merged into one OS." We need diversity. It's ludicrous to suggest that they should be merged. I have the libraries for both, and think most people do. Apps for both work just fine. Diversity is a good thing.
What I've dubbed "RPM Hell" -- you go to install some innocent little package, which has 20 dependencies. You install the first dependency, and see that it has 20 dependencies.
You realize you're going to be there for a LONG time, as it seems your work grows exponentially every time you install a dependency.
Can I view an UltraVNC-served desktop with Xvncviewer on Linux? UltraVNC looks quite impressive, but having only one Windows box I use VNC on, it won't do me any good if I can't connect. It says only Windows is supported, but mentions it's compatible with Real/TightVNC; does this mean I can view it on Linux?
I think I'll give it a try either way, though. Looks pretty nice.
does anyone know how I could get a job working at SCO?
Yup. Just brush up on your BS skills, practice threatening extremely large comporations (and governments), and try to make the biggest fool out of yourself you can. We'll call you in a week to schedule an interview.
I'm real impressed. It's 14 MHz and it's still running for me. Slashdot can bring down a top-notch server running a fine-tuned install of Linux, but not a 14 MHz box?! It's showing 17 current connections.
Having a 14 MHz box survive a Slashdotting is a _real_ good ad for the OS it's running.:)
On another note, for those who thought VNC over 100BaseT was slow
Venturing slightly off-topic (don't blame me; the site's Slashdotted:)), why is VNC slow over 100 Mbps switched Ethernet?
I VNC'ed into my laptop (although it only has 11 Mbps WiFi), and it might as well have been overseas on a 14.4 dialup?! It wasn't bandwidth -- it's a small home network, so there was the full 11 Mbps available. I rarely broke 100 kbps. The laptop (WinXP) hit about 50% CPU use, but shouldn't have slowed to a crawl? (The desktop viewing the laptop oinly took a tiny CPU hit.)
So I can't even find a bottleneck. Does it just run slowly by nature? And can that be changed?:)
Anyone see irony here?
--- Netblock info for respectcopyrights.org (66.252.129.188) ------------------
OrgName: WareNet
OrgID: WARE
Address: Box 4774
City: Mission Viejo
StateProv: CA
PostalCode: 92690
Country: US
NetRange: 66.252.128.0 - 66.252.143.255
CIDR: 66.252.128.0/20
Sounds a lot like warez.net. Coincidence?
Just a note for those not aware... buying a scanner capable of receiving the cell band is illegal in the US, as is listening in. (ie, unlike many things, just owning a scanner capable of listening to the cell bands is illegal, although I think people who had them prior to the law were 'grandfathered')
Not that I personally have any objections to this, just figured I'd point out that if you're a US resident not wishing to go to jail, you may wish to buy cell-blocked versions.
It depends on how big your ISP is. If they immediately feed you out onto someone else's network (ie, if they're a tiny ISP or whatnot), you'll get low pings (in theory). A larger ISP (Adelphia, in my case) has like 8 hops before I go onto above.net, averaging 39 ms until I'm off adelphiacom.net.
Latency on your ISP's network isn't necessarily a meaningful measurement. I'd be much more interested in ping times to certain hosts. I average ~80 ms, although this can vary hugely -- if I'm pinging sites in Asia, it'll obviously be a bit bigger.
In typical Slashdot style, replying to a joke with a technical correction:
It's 127/8. (It's a/8, or Class A as it used to be known as.) I think it's VERY rare for people to find reason to give more that 255 'localhost' IPs to their box, but if you don't believe me... ping 127.2.3.4 (using whatever values for 2, 3, and 4).
Now 127.0.0.1/24 SHOULD be the way it's done, IMHO. I can't even come up with any oddball reasons for having more than 255 localhost IPs.
I thought it was illegal to encrypt over wireless connections...
I don't think it is. As a ham, I know we're not allowed to use 'codes or ciphers,' but just about anything else nowadays uses encryption. WEP over wireless Ethernet. Digital spread spectrum (I suppose that's debatable on whether it's encryption or just obscurity?) on my cordless phone. The box for my cell phone bears a "RSA Encryption" logo.
It doesn't make sense from a legislative standpoint, either. The people who really have something to hide probably would do wired for added security. It'd be like saying "You can't scream codes across a crowded building," but allowing you to write them down and secretly exchange them. All you'd do is end up making it harder for Big Brother to decode, since they'd have difficulty even finding the signal if it was over wire.
I believe you're mistaken, or perhaps thinking of something else. But then again, it's also possible I'm wrong and these are just special circumstances.
Well, I can definitely see what you meant, but I was trying to say... if my code inadvertently ended up similar to theirs. Of course, in the example I gave, it wouldn't work. But back when I took C++, I was talking to someone else about how they coded one of the projects... Parts of his code were exactly the same as mine (except for some formatting -- he put braces on their own line, used more spaces...), right down to the variable names. But I didn't copy his, and I know he didn't copy mine.
Which, IMHO, proves why software copyright doesn't work out too well -- if I wrote directions to my house, and you wrote directions to my house (stalker!), they'd probably be very similar. You shouldn't have to introduce random detours just so your directions aren't the same as mine.
I guess I'd have to learn German, though? Although wasn't it Germany that tried to decide that porn sites had to shut down at night or something insane?
Suppose I work at Microsoft designing Outlook, and then dabble in programming for Evolution when I'm at home. What's to stop me from thinking I'm doing the OSS community a favor and slipping some of the newest Outlook code into KMail to give it a new feature?
Sure, I'd be legally liable if MS found out I did it, especially if it was deliberate. But what should/can be done by OSS project leads to ensure that all code others contribute is entirely legal?
While I think we all know how absurd SCO's claims are, suppose they win. Where will Linux go? Overseas?/dev/null? Will it be rewritten from scratch? Or will people simply buy licenses willingly?
Slashdot Mirror
While you all joke about how it's CowboyNeal, SCO, or RMS, I seem to be the only one to know its true identity. It's clearly Bigfoot.
If you call tech support and almost immediately ask to speak to second level support, will they escalate the call, or do they force you to go through their nonsense first?
Someone at my ISP cautioned me that, when I restarted my cable modem, I had to crawl under my desk and unplug it from the wall; I couldn't unplug the end of the cable going into the cable modem. (?!)
When I get a particularly clueless tech, can I ask to be elevated, or do I have to put up with them until I stump them?
I think ISPs should keep a record. When I tell them exactly what's wrong, and turn out to be right, they should put a star next to my name or something, designating that I have a clue. Until you've experienced it, you don't know how irritating it is to have to reconfigure your network so you're not behind a firewall/router just so they can see you were right in the first place.
There are some people who definitely need to be asked routine questions, but I'd be unbelievably happy if they'd pick up the phone and see, "Hey, this guy must know what he's talking about" and believe me when I tell them what router on their network is down.
Heh, that's when you blatantly lie. "Okay, hang on, lemme reboot." Put the phone down for a minute, grab a drink, and come back. :)
My cable ISP, Adelphia, possibly has the worst tech support ever.
I've called before, and literally said "I'm losing packets past the third hop, [router name] in Albany. I have a link, I just can't get out onto the backbone."
She had me reboot my modem. Unsurprisgly, still didn't work. Then she wanted my IP to try to ping. After what seemed like a few hours, she concluded "Hmm... I can't get to you." Really?
Better yet, my dad somehow ended up having to explain how to the tech how she used ping.
(I'm not mentioning the 30 minute wait times, the horrible on-hold music that cuts out, or that ads for phone service that play while you're calling to report that your cable modem's down -- rather a bad time to try to sell me stuff... And the ads interrupt each other if you wait long enough, too.)
Appologies if I come off as a karma whore, or an off-topic ranter, but I wanted to make the note that "ham" is simply another term for "amateur" radio. There's much debate about where the "ham" name from.
:)
But it doesn't stand for anything, and thus HAM isn't really correct. It's rather like the people who, unfamiliar with the term, talk about LINUX, not Linux. To those familiar with the term, and who regard caps as SHOUTING, it's rather disconcerting to have people randomly shouting "HAM!" at you.
So please, ham, not HAM.
As far as overpowering, we're allowed 1,500 Watts; I doubt more than a few exceed that.
I certainly can't speak for everyone, but most of the hams I know are genuinely concerned about interference, many to the point of coming over and diagnosing problems if desired. (I should note that more often than not, the problem is shoddily-made electronics such as TVs or radios, as opposed to the radios themselves, although it's certainly not absolute.) Rather than trying to cause interference back, perhaps you could try to talk to neighborhood hams. I bet they'd be eager and willing to rectify the problem.
And don't say ham radio would be useful in some sort of natural disaster, seeing as the internet WAS designed to withstand a nuclear attack!
The Internet as a whole will never go down. But when was the last time your Internet connection went down? Earlier today, for me, lasting an hour or two. When your town is hit by a tornado, do you really think you'll still have an Internet connection? Sure, much of the world does. But not your town, where you need the help.
Besides the emergency communication aspect, ham radio's just fun. Sure, I can e-mail someone overseas. But to talk without wires? Can you do that? I can. Sure, more people may take interest in the Internet than ham radio, but that's like saying "This Linux thing... Who needs it? Not many people use it; Windows is SOOOO much easier to add new hardware with. Surely we can just do away with Linux and let the Windows people be?" It's absurd to propose doing away with ham radio entirely.
That's really naive. Why do we still rely on cars? They're over 100 years old; haven't we moved to something more modern?
To suggest that ham radio hasn't evolved is completely ignorant. Modern ham radios sport LCDs, top-quality DSP filters to pull out signals you might not otherwise here, advanced speech compression, etc. Modern repeaters are Internet-linked; a local repeater might be linked with one in a foreign country over the Internet. It's hardly the radio Marconi knew.
Futhermore, hams are constantly coming up with new ideas. 'Back in the day,' it was a ham who invented cordless phones. (Which eventually evolved into cell phones.) Hams are constantly innovating; while some hams love nothing more than Morse code on an 'antique' radio, quite a few are also pioneering new technologies -- PSK31, for example, a remarkable digital technology usable on the HF (worldwide) bands, that uses very little bandwidth and is able to work well even with heavy interference.
Yet another factor you overlook is the role hams play in emergency communications. A TON of hams are actively involved in emergency communications. I'm hundreds of miles from New York City; on September 12th, 2001, several local hams flew out to NYC to help with emergency communications. In a testament to how many hams help, they were turned away due to the fact that they already had too many volunteers providing emergency communications.
I have a cell phone and a high-speed Internet connection. But what happens when there's an Earthquake, and the local phone lines (which the cell towers are connected to) and Internet lines are taken down? Hams have a history -- that lives on -- of providing emergency communications.
I think RFID would be far less opposed if there were legislation passed required all devices with RFID devices to bear a prominent "This object contains an RFID transmitter," along with a brief description of what this means.
Rather like how places using video cameras put "CCTV Monitoring Is In Use for Your Protection" signs up -- now you know it has RFID, and can make the decision on your own.
The people who argue that GNOME and KDE have to be standardized. I agree that I should be able to use KDE but run GNOME apps, but that's why you have libraries for both.
The people who argue that KDE and GNOME need to merge are amongst the greatest annoyances. It's just like saying "Microsoft and Linux don't play together well. They should be merged into one OS." We need diversity. It's ludicrous to suggest that they should be merged. I have the libraries for both, and think most people do. Apps for both work just fine. Diversity is a good thing.
What I've dubbed "RPM Hell" -- you go to install some innocent little package, which has 20 dependencies. You install the first dependency, and see that it has 20 dependencies.
You realize you're going to be there for a LONG time, as it seems your work grows exponentially every time you install a dependency.
Can I view an UltraVNC-served desktop with Xvncviewer on Linux? UltraVNC looks quite impressive, but having only one Windows box I use VNC on, it won't do me any good if I can't connect. It says only Windows is supported, but mentions it's compatible with Real/TightVNC; does this mean I can view it on Linux?
I think I'll give it a try either way, though. Looks pretty nice.
does anyone know how I could get a job working at SCO?
Yup. Just brush up on your BS skills, practice threatening extremely large comporations (and governments), and try to make the biggest fool out of yourself you can. We'll call you in a week to schedule an interview.
I'm real impressed. It's 14 MHz and it's still running for me. Slashdot can bring down a top-notch server running a fine-tuned install of Linux, but not a 14 MHz box?! It's showing 17 current connections.
:)
Having a 14 MHz box survive a Slashdotting is a _real_ good ad for the OS it's running.
On another note, for those who thought VNC over 100BaseT was slow
:)), why is VNC slow over 100 Mbps switched Ethernet?
:)
Venturing slightly off-topic (don't blame me; the site's Slashdotted
I VNC'ed into my laptop (although it only has 11 Mbps WiFi), and it might as well have been overseas on a 14.4 dialup?! It wasn't bandwidth -- it's a small home network, so there was the full 11 Mbps available. I rarely broke 100 kbps. The laptop (WinXP) hit about 50% CPU use, but shouldn't have slowed to a crawl? (The desktop viewing the laptop oinly took a tiny CPU hit.)
So I can't even find a bottleneck. Does it just run slowly by nature? And can that be changed?
Anyone see irony here? --- Netblock info for respectcopyrights.org (66.252.129.188) ------------------ OrgName: WareNet OrgID: WARE Address: Box 4774 City: Mission Viejo StateProv: CA PostalCode: 92690 Country: US NetRange: 66.252.128.0 - 66.252.143.255 CIDR: 66.252.128.0/20 Sounds a lot like warez.net. Coincidence?
Just a note for those not aware... buying a scanner capable of receiving the cell band is illegal in the US, as is listening in. (ie, unlike many things, just owning a scanner capable of listening to the cell bands is illegal, although I think people who had them prior to the law were 'grandfathered')
Not that I personally have any objections to this, just figured I'd point out that if you're a US resident not wishing to go to jail, you may wish to buy cell-blocked versions.
It depends on how big your ISP is. If they immediately feed you out onto someone else's network (ie, if they're a tiny ISP or whatnot), you'll get low pings (in theory). A larger ISP (Adelphia, in my case) has like 8 hops before I go onto above.net, averaging 39 ms until I'm off adelphiacom.net. Latency on your ISP's network isn't necessarily a meaningful measurement. I'd be much more interested in ping times to certain hosts. I average ~80 ms, although this can vary hugely -- if I'm pinging sites in Asia, it'll obviously be a bit bigger.
In typical Slashdot style, replying to a joke with a technical correction:
/8, or Class A as it used to be known as.) I think it's VERY rare for people to find reason to give more that 255 'localhost' IPs to their box, but if you don't believe me... ping 127.2.3.4 (using whatever values for 2, 3, and 4).
It's 127/8. (It's a
Now 127.0.0.1/24 SHOULD be the way it's done, IMHO. I can't even come up with any oddball reasons for having more than 255 localhost IPs.
I thought it was illegal to encrypt over wireless connections...
I don't think it is. As a ham, I know we're not allowed to use 'codes or ciphers,' but just about anything else nowadays uses encryption. WEP over wireless Ethernet. Digital spread spectrum (I suppose that's debatable on whether it's encryption or just obscurity?) on my cordless phone. The box for my cell phone bears a "RSA Encryption" logo.
It doesn't make sense from a legislative standpoint, either. The people who really have something to hide probably would do wired for added security. It'd be like saying "You can't scream codes across a crowded building," but allowing you to write them down and secretly exchange them. All you'd do is end up making it harder for Big Brother to decode, since they'd have difficulty even finding the signal if it was over wire.
I believe you're mistaken, or perhaps thinking of something else. But then again, it's also possible I'm wrong and these are just special circumstances.
Well, I can definitely see what you meant, but I was trying to say... if my code inadvertently ended up similar to theirs. Of course, in the example I gave, it wouldn't work. But back when I took C++, I was talking to someone else about how they coded one of the projects... Parts of his code were exactly the same as mine (except for some formatting -- he put braces on their own line, used more spaces...), right down to the variable names. But I didn't copy his, and I know he didn't copy mine.
Which, IMHO, proves why software copyright doesn't work out too well -- if I wrote directions to my house, and you wrote directions to my house (stalker!), they'd probably be very similar. You shouldn't have to introduce random detours just so your directions aren't the same as mine.
Beer at McDonald's? o_O
I guess I'd have to learn German, though? Although wasn't it Germany that tried to decide that porn sites had to shut down at night or something insane?
Suppose I work at Microsoft designing Outlook, and then dabble in programming for Evolution when I'm at home. What's to stop me from thinking I'm doing the OSS community a favor and slipping some of the newest Outlook code into KMail to give it a new feature?
Sure, I'd be legally liable if MS found out I did it, especially if it was deliberate. But what should/can be done by OSS project leads to ensure that all code others contribute is entirely legal?
While I think we all know how absurd SCO's claims are, suppose they win. Where will Linux go? Overseas? /dev/null? Will it be rewritten from scratch? Or will people simply buy licenses willingly?