Personally, my ADSL connection ROCKS! When it was first installed, I tested the connection speed, and I got 1.2 Mbps. Nothing has changed in the year since then. It is still blazingly fast.
I contrast this to coworkers' experiences with cable modem. One coworker's connection tested out at 1.5 Mbps when he first got it installed. Now he says that during peak periods, it feels like about 100 Kbps.
Now I will say this -- ADSL has some problems. For instance, I've had problems getting online when some loser sets his computer to a static IP address and the BellSouth DHCP server hands me that same IP address. That usually requires about 45 minutes on the phone with a tech support person to resolve it. I wish BellSouth had a way to detect and squash such behavior. (They may have implemented something recently, since the problem hasn't happened in a while)
It also sucks that BellSouth uses MAC addresses as part of their authentication process (no Linksys routers for you!!!). I can only connect with the NIC they provided me. Once I set up Internet Connection Sharing under Win 98 SE with another NIC in the box, they won't provide me tech support. Pretty lame, if you ask me. The days of one-machine-online-per-household are limited, especially for early adopters of broadband.
You've never supported an IRIX box, have you? Try this for size: $2000/year per machine for an IRIX support contract. In our case, we couldn't even get Y2K _patches_ without this support contract. That's why we bagged our SGIs and went to Linux/Intel.
Linux _does_ deserve some of the cost-containment credit. You're right about the hardware, but there's a heavy price tag to proprietary UNIXes.
"Printing" a document to a file to save it is so incredibly non-intuitive it's not even funny. It took me about 2-3 minutes of digging through help pages to figure out how to save a freakin' file.
Don't get me wrong -- I'm no Lynx-basher. It has its uses, that's for sure!
As somebody who works for a local television broadcaster, maybe I can provide a different perspective on this.
First off, you should know that even as a broadcaster, we are prevented from transmitting Major League Baseball video on the 'net. We Webcast all of our weekday evening newscasts, and we have to cut them off before the sports segment because of a cease-and-desist order filed by MLB. Personally, I think their policy sucks. Who's going to not watch baseball on TV because they saw a highlight clip in 120x90, 10fps RealVideo on our Web site? "Oh, I've had my fill of baseball for today after watching that jerky clip where I could n't even see the ball... guess I don't need to watch the World Series..." Please.
But what MLB is probably doing is just staking their claim to their intellectual property. Someday, with broadband to the home, online video may seriously compete with broadcast television. If MLB didn't fight for the right to control their property now (as silly as it seems today), they'd be screwed down the line.
As for anybody who thinks that it's OK to rebroadcast a television station's content just because you're not editing out the commercials, what do you think about framing a Web site and slapping your own banners up top? Is that OK just because you didn't take the banners out of the content-providing site?
iCraveTV is nothing more than a little parasite that will be squashed soon enough. International legal issues may slow the process a bit, but the idiots who dreamed up this get-rich-with-a-dot-com scheme will not even be a footnote in the history of the 'net.
Slashdot readers will be interested to note that Warren Robinett, credited as having conceived the nanoManipulator, was one of the chief developers of Adventure. Remember the little "invisible dot" you could retrieve to be able to pass through a wall to read the credits for the game?
Cool idea, but from the standpoint of somebody who needs his machines to be up 24-7, I want standard, off-the-shelf hardware inside my server's case. I want to be able to replace any and all hardware within a couple of hours. The more VA Research deviates from standard PC hardware, the more they resemble Sun, SGI, and the rest of the commercial UNIX vendors.
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I contrast this to coworkers' experiences with cable modem. One coworker's connection tested out at 1.5 Mbps when he first got it installed. Now he says that during peak periods, it feels like about 100 Kbps.
Now I will say this -- ADSL has some problems. For instance, I've had problems getting online when some loser sets his computer to a static IP address and the BellSouth DHCP server hands me that same IP address. That usually requires about 45 minutes on the phone with a tech support person to resolve it. I wish BellSouth had a way to detect and squash such behavior. (They may have implemented something recently, since the problem hasn't happened in a while)
It also sucks that BellSouth uses MAC addresses as part of their authentication process (no Linksys routers for you!!!). I can only connect with the NIC they provided me. Once I set up Internet Connection Sharing under Win 98 SE with another NIC in the box, they won't provide me tech support. Pretty lame, if you ask me. The days of one-machine-online-per-household are limited, especially for early adopters of broadband.
But overall, I love ADSL.
You've never supported an IRIX box, have you? Try this for size: $2000/year per machine for an IRIX support contract. In our case, we couldn't even get Y2K _patches_ without this support contract. That's why we bagged our SGIs and went to Linux/Intel.
Linux _does_ deserve some of the cost-containment credit. You're right about the hardware, but there's a heavy price tag to proprietary UNIXes.
Use Putty as your ssh client. It rocks, it's free, and it is only 210 K. A SINGLE FILE -- no freakin' installers; no freakin' DLLs.
t y/
http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/put
"Printing" a document to a file to save it is so incredibly non-intuitive it's not even funny. It took me about 2-3 minutes of digging through help pages to figure out how to save a freakin' file.
Don't get me wrong -- I'm no Lynx-basher. It has its uses, that's for sure!
...if you ask no questions, beware of lies...
As somebody who works for a local television broadcaster, maybe I can provide a different perspective on this.
First off, you should know that even as a broadcaster, we are prevented from transmitting Major League Baseball video on the 'net. We Webcast all of our weekday evening newscasts, and we have to cut them off before the sports segment because of a cease-and-desist order filed by MLB.
Personally, I think their policy sucks. Who's going to not watch baseball on TV because they saw a highlight clip in 120x90, 10fps RealVideo on our Web site? "Oh, I've had my fill of baseball for today after watching that jerky clip where I could n't even see the ball... guess I don't need to watch the World Series..." Please.
But what MLB is probably doing is just staking their claim to their intellectual property. Someday, with broadband to the home, online video may seriously compete with broadcast television. If MLB didn't fight for the right to control their property now (as silly as it seems today), they'd be screwed down the line.
As for anybody who thinks that it's OK to rebroadcast a television station's content just because you're not editing out the commercials, what do you think about framing a Web site and slapping your own banners up top? Is that OK just because you didn't take the banners out of the content-providing site?
iCraveTV is nothing more than a little parasite that will be squashed soon enough. International legal issues may slow the process a bit, but the idiots who dreamed up this get-rich-with-a-dot-com scheme will not even be a footnote in the history of the 'net.
How cool is that?
Cool idea, but from the standpoint of somebody who needs his machines to be up 24-7, I want standard, off-the-shelf hardware inside my server's case. I want to be able to replace any and all hardware within a couple of hours. The more VA Research deviates from standard PC hardware, the more they resemble Sun, SGI, and the rest of the commercial UNIX vendors.