Romana: never Leela: Yes, often. She was great in the sack. Teegin: once when we were drunk
Re:I'm as stumped as my girlfriend usually is
on
Telstar 4 is Down
·
· Score: 1
Looks like someone didn't take their humour pill this morning. Humor pills are illegal in the US.
Re:I'm as stumped as my girlfriend usually is
on
Telstar 4 is Down
·
· Score: 0, Flamebait
Yeah? well then you have no business reading about electronics and communications. Stop your bitching and read up, this is actually pretty elementary. CW means continuous wave, which sometimes means morse code. Satellites wear out. So they send up new ones. Loral is a big satellite company, telstar is a series of satellites.
Humans are called to be stewards of Earth, which means we're to keep the planet in good condition. Solar power helps us do that by reducing pollutants from fossil fuels etc.
Chickens eat corn, and we eat chickens. Does that mean we shouldn't eat corn? Your 'natural order' is rubbish. It's people like you that make true Christians look like mindless fanatics. That's not to say that there aren't Christians like that, but you're not helping the case of us who are not.
Thank you.
First of all, though, I don't believe in the Christian God, and in fact I think that all of its relatives (judaism and islam included) are horrible mistakes. But that doesn't keept me from agreeing with certain things that Christians have been known to say.
There's nothing 'unnatural' about not eating meat. However, what you eat does have many consquences for your life. I am starting to believe that this goes far beyond traditional notions of nutrition. Organisms (you and your food) are complex things made of a vast number of different chemicals creating the potential for a number of different configurations, some harmful some beneficial and most somewhere in between.
It amazes me how the typical American is appaled by 'drugs' saying "how can you put that into your body, not knowing what it will do?" - without thinking about what they are eating and its origin.
Wow maybe this is way off topic. So it may cost me points, so what. Back to the topic of at least this sub-thread: Maybe god created us guardians of the earth, and we are judged both individually and as a species based upon the how good a job we are doing. So far, I'd say it's mixed.
First of all, some of you are saying "yea, so what, I did this...or consume.net has been around for a long time..." -- you don't get it. It's not a traditional 802.11b network. It's an advanced mesh network, with special routing protocols, etc. The software is available on sourceforge, go look.
What's the scalability of this thing? There are limits. I don't believe there is any way to make a single, nationwide mesh network. However there is nothing saying that you can't have multiple, partially overlapping mesh nets, arranged in cells like the cellular phone network. This is fun if you have more than one 802.11 card.
On latency: The average latency isn't bad. But like many statistics, that is deceiving. The latency is highly variable. Not so bad when you are using ssh as it would be when you are attempting to do telephony. Of course, the cheap-ass compression pushed on us by telcos in an effort to squeeze extra pennies out has made us used to this lag.
On robustness: This technology can tolerate the failure of a large number of nodes. The comment about being similar to NY power grid was very stupid, this isn't similar at all. However the current network architecture is not as robust as it could be, a look at the node map will show that the Internet gateway and most reachable node is located on top of one building, NE43 at MIT. In fact this building is slated for demolition, and the network will be rearranged for that reason. Though this routing technology is robust, the underlying 802.11 layer is not, it is way to easy to jam and otherwise attack. But simulataneously DoSing enough nodes to take down the network would be a difficult task.
Hmm...what happens when MIT decides to turn off this point, though?
What's happening already is moving off of MIT's bandwidth. This will allow non-MIT people to use the network as well (people such as myself). We're planning on running this on our RoofServers and very soon Cambridge/Boston and realise the goals of BAWIA.
A t1 line is still over $700 per month, so burstable bandwidth starts at more than $2 per gigabyte. People who are on better pipes pay way less, of course,...
Let me tell you how much less: As low as $30/Mb/second/month for an ISP, though typically more (that price is for Cogent bandwidth, and they don't have the greatest network), but certainly pretty good quality bandwidth can be had for
What I am getting at is that bandwidth for the big guys such as AOL is dirt cheap. Images hosted from LJ use such a small amount of bandwidth in the big picture, it's not worth worrying about. My guess is that there is some sort of policy decision that they are making. They're probably doing this to move people to their own blogg thing. As an ISP, this action is reprehensible. MSN's search engine results are bad enough, but then this? What is going to happen when everyone starts blocking access to their competitors? These are the end days, perhaps.
don't believe that there was much comercialization of Free Software in 1993. IIRC, the only distributions available before Debian were (something Nordic that I no longer remember how to spell) and Slackware.
There were distributions in 92 that I used. SLS (Soft Landing) and Manchester Interim Release come to mind.
Has anyone been able to substantiate this supposed busts? SOunds like a way to get publicity/money.
1) a subpoena is not a bust. It means show up in court. And it can be fought on jurisdictional grounds. This is a prime EFF case.
2) Palestine doesn't have shit for infrastructure, I have difficulty believing anyone can have any sort of net connection there. First, Israel would destroy it. If not, the Islamist fundemanentalists would.
3) I've heard too many stories on the streets about hard times, etc, yea war veteran with three kids but I am off drugs, yadda yadda. Why should the net be any different? No I won't send you money. I'll send money to places that know a con job from the real thing and act appropriately.
If this is for real and you really have been shafted, my sincere hope that things get sorted out and you are cleared. But you need to think about how to do publicity in a way that doesn't make it seem like the nigerian scam.
I am a licensed ham radio operator, and proud to be one. Sitting here, waiting for the disease to spread, I waited by my ham station. Passed some traffic (a human relay), but luckily was spared.
Yes, this blackout is the best thing to happen to ham radio in a while. Maybe this stupid idea of broadband over power lines will finally be snipped.
How about just plain old shouting? Isn't that pretty low tech?
...and popular in new york and certain other places. But not bvery effective, unless you have some great reason to want to raise many people's blood pressure / annoyance.
This is the worst idea yet...I'd rather the RIAA was busting down doors looking for the crap that most people download, than have to give most of the RIAA 'artists', who are horrible musicians anyhow, any morney.
This is a guesstimate, but I have installed Linux (and some *BSD) boxes at various job sites without managements knowledge or permission, often on 'surplus' hardware (someones old PC sitting in a closet), for about 8 years now. Only about 1 in 60 of these was in some way countable by outsiders.
This starts to be the question, how is Linux counted? Three broad categories: media sales, net scans, and installation reports.
Media Sales - simple count up the sales reports from major vendors. Using this method alone, one would get an unrealisticly low estimate of Linux users. Though I have installed Linux on over 250 machines, I have only purchased CDs from a vendor twice (OpenBSD 2.7 and Slackware 3.3). I have purchased CDs from other sources: flea markets, computer stores, etc - but these are not 'official' pressings and probably are not counted.
Net Scans - Netcraft does a srvey to see what OS / web server various sites are using. WHile this is handy, a lot of the servers I have installed have not been accessible to the outside world, for security reasons. Ones that are available to the outside world have a limited number of services running, and a firewall (usually the Linux machine itself) for access control. So this still isn't accurate.
Installation Reports - Various OSs request permission to inform a central location of a new Linux installation upon the installs completion. The ease of this process varies quite a bit. I used to never report, out of general paranoia, but I have started to in the past few years. I think we all should. I also think that there needs to be a standard method on installtion counting and reporting: some way to determine if a specific install is actually an upgrade, a switch, or whatever, and a way to protect users' privacy, but give some good statistics about the install. For instance, it would be great to report the platform (including CPU type & speed, memory, HD space, peripheral cards) and even the package selections. I know this is what redhat does with their RH network stuff, and though some people may find it annoying and opt out it does provide useful information to help developers and businesspeople in their decisions about where to concentrate support resources.
Here's an interesting bit of historical trivia: Back years ago, mayb 1996 or so, I was running tcpdump and noticed some very strange DNS queries. Every so often my Slackware machine would query to root servers for what turned out to be the last line of my/etc/hosts file -- which was a comment. I think it was every 30 or 60 minutes or something. Years later, I was talking to a friend of mine who worked at a site that housed one of the root servers, and he was in a position to count how many of these queries came in...there were HUGE numbers. What is interesting is that we found that older versions of Red Hat also had this odd DNS behavoir, but that newer versions of RH and Slackware did not. So this was an interesting method of counting older installs of a few types of linux, but in the end not effective.
There's no shortage of IP space. The problem is really a political one. There is much space assigned to various US DoD organizations. At first glance, this is not surprising, as the Internet grew from Arpanet/Milnet. But now, most of this stuff for security reasons has moved off of the Internet, which is reasonable. Why haven't they turned in their allocations?
What's even worse, DoD actually was assigned, by IANA, two NEW class A spaces in 1998 (214.0.0.0 and 215.0.0.0 , i.e. 214/7) -- for WHAT REASON?
Something stinks at IANA.
I am also not very pleased with ARIN. They seem to exist to serve only themselves and huge corporations. Their fee structure is set up to crush the small ISPs. The yearly fee for small allocations is high, but in bulk it is almost a reasonable price, except when you figure out they're doing basically no work for $20k. I understand the technical reasons for wanting to aggregate IP space (simpler routing tables around the world), so they want end-users with 'portable' IP space to turn them in, or at least stop using them. Not so great for hobbyists and geeks who like to switch ISPs but keep their IP space.
ARIN needs to seriously stop being pricks to the small guys and start rethinking how to accomplish their goals. I have some ideas. But slashdot is no place to get into a technical discussion of this. Hell, I don't know if anyone is reading this who cares, or even would know what I was talking about.
People want to know why we can't do this in the US. Lots of finger pointing at telco greed (somewhat true) but there is more than just that, which is blocking such a revolution.
There is a huge difference between the highly connected and not areas in the US, due to the way technology has developed. Lots of fiber was put in the ground over the past ten years, fed by the expansion of telecom and datacom industries. Once the right-of-way has been purchased, the building permits acquired, the trenches dug and conduit layed, is is just a small bit more expensive to put in a lot of fiber than it is a little. So it wasn't uncommon to see 24 fibers where one would carry the traffic. This also provides some redundancy in case of failure.
You can get a lot of miles with small signal loss on fiber, but every time you splice it, there is a cost in both signal in addition to the economic. So the idea is to lay fiber to carry a lot of traffic to point B from point A, not stopping along the way.
The metallic plant (copper) is old and available and easier to splice, but has horrible performance. But this is fine if you are only going a couple of miles...most of the time. many times it can't even get that far (I am cursed with a crappy T1). Too expensive to run fiber out for everyone, splicing along the way.
So there was already all this capacity between places like New York and Boston and Washington DC, but a paucity to places like Burlington Vermont. Then there was all that 'dark fiber' that was kept in reserve, no signal going through it. But what exacerbated the situation was the development of DWDM technology, which made it possible to run much more data through each of these fibers by utilizing signals in bands that are closer together. But this equipment is expensive.
The end result is that bandwidth rich areas get richer, and the poor aren't helped at all. For an example of how bad this is, some years back the Massachusetts Turnpike Authority sold rights to run fiber down the 'pike, which stretches across the state east and west. This was very profitable in the densly populated eastern half of the state, dominated by Boston and the Rt.128 technology hub. But out in the western the hinterlands, that is across the Connecticut river and deep into area code 413, it wsn't seen as profitable. So the fiber did not run past Westfield, leaving the rest of the state left out and still with pokey, expensive, 1960s age technology. There was a great cry that again the rural population was being screwed, and a consortium was formed, called Berkshire Connect (http://www.bconnect.org) to take over the fiber rights and get western mass lit up. Unfortunately they teamed up with Global Crossing and they had many bankruptcy problems which slowed the project. But it is up and running, they've got 50 members they say, but I have no idea what the actual cost of connectivity is. I am sure it is much more expensive than what we pay in Boston.
I am not sure what can change this situation. Yes, government grants step in and throw some money around, but it will take a real lot to change the basic underlying economics. My guess is that the precipitous drop in the cost of equipment fiber, and real estate rights with the telecom market crash may bring prices into the affordable range, and maybe some local people are hired by the government as part of a public works project to put it all into the ground.
Then, there's microwave. But its reliability is an order of magnitude less than that of fiber.
In addition to the lack of information systems infrastructure, and more importantly, there is a lack of communications infrastructure. While there's no doubt that some big company (Worldcom?) who is friends of the Bush2 administration (like Halliburton) will get a multi-billion dollar contract to build a fiber network some time in the next couple of years, what does afganistan do RIGHT NOW?
Thomas Sailor wrote 'soundmodem' drivers for linux years back. These, used with other modules such as AX.25, allow for a medium distance (up to 200 miles) but low speed (9600 bps half duplex) link for CHEAP. An old Pentium 90 system is free in the US, so if they can be carted to afganistan cheaply, cost is no problem. VHF/UHF radio gear can be junked old Motorola (and other mfgrs) commercial/police radios which are reliable and available for almost nothing in the US, again the problem is carting the to afganistan. Antennas can be made out of wire.
of course I can't neglect 802.11b, as the throughput is much higher. But the distance is lower, and putting amplifiers and large antennas on 802.11b gear, and getting antennas at a decent height and aimed correctly, makes it more ambitious a project. But the great thing with 802.11b is you could have many VoIP telephone conversations going on at the same time.
The largest problem, as I see it, is power. I don't know what the electrical situation is there but I am sure it is pretty bad. I suppose there could be solar and wind power, but photovoltaic cells in particular are expensive and very likely to be stolen. Maybe just wind power then, made from junked automobile alternators. And bicycle power for an emergency.
Yeah, we can rebuild Afganistan. Now, how about Buffalo?
What's sad is, I knew what this code did immediately upon reading it. And didn't even have to consult my Beagle Brothers Peeks, Pokes, and Pointers chart.
I am not rich enough to have a IIgs, but I do have several ][e and ][+s. I even have the original flopy drive I got with my first ][+ in 1981!
Yeah, I've been doing this stuff for not quite 19 years but enough to tell BS from the real thing. Will somone post a link to a bittorrent of this thing, so I can download it, read it, and review?
Slashdot Mirror
OK Maybe I should clarify things:
Romana: never
Leela: Yes, often. She was great in the sack.
Teegin: once when we were drunk
Looks like someone didn't take their humour pill this morning. Humor pills are illegal in the US.
Yeah? well then you have no business reading about electronics and communications. Stop your bitching and read up, this is actually pretty elementary. CW means continuous wave, which sometimes means morse code. Satellites wear out. So they send up new ones. Loral is a big satellite company, telstar is a series of satellites.
Yeah I forgot to mention that. But what I said is still true. At least as true as it can be, considering I am not one of the 'chosen race'
Chickens eat corn, and we eat chickens. Does that mean we shouldn't eat corn? Your 'natural order' is rubbish. It's people like you that make true Christians look like mindless fanatics. That's not to say that there aren't Christians like that, but you're not helping the case of us who are not.
Thank you.
First of all, though, I don't believe in the Christian God, and in fact I think that all of its relatives (judaism and islam included) are horrible mistakes. But that doesn't keept me from agreeing with certain things that Christians have been known to say.
There's nothing 'unnatural' about not eating meat. However, what you eat does have many consquences for your life. I am starting to believe that this goes far beyond traditional notions of nutrition. Organisms (you and your food) are complex things made of a vast number of different chemicals creating the potential for a number of different configurations, some harmful some beneficial and most somewhere in between.
It amazes me how the typical American is appaled by 'drugs' saying "how can you put that into your body, not knowing what it will do?" - without thinking about what they are eating and its origin.
Wow maybe this is way off topic. So it may cost me points, so what. Back to the topic of at least this sub-thread: Maybe god created us guardians of the earth, and we are judged both individually and as a species based upon the how good a job we are doing. So far, I'd say it's mixed.
It's more than that, JHVH is an acronym/abbreviation for the two aspects of God, and the relationship between them.
John Titor's claims seem frighteningly credible.
First of all, some of you are saying "yea, so what, I did this...or consume.net has been around for a long time..." -- you don't get it. It's not a traditional 802.11b network. It's an advanced mesh network, with special routing protocols, etc. The software is available on sourceforge, go look.
What's the scalability of this thing? There are limits. I don't believe there is any way to make a single, nationwide mesh network. However there is nothing saying that you can't have multiple, partially overlapping mesh nets, arranged in cells like the cellular phone network. This is fun if you have more than one 802.11 card.
On latency: The average latency isn't bad. But like many statistics, that is deceiving. The latency is highly variable. Not so bad when you are using ssh as it would be when you are attempting to do telephony. Of course, the cheap-ass compression pushed on us by telcos in an effort to squeeze extra pennies out has made us used to this lag.
On robustness: This technology can tolerate the failure of a large number of nodes. The comment about being similar to NY power grid was very stupid, this isn't similar at all. However the current network architecture is not as robust as it could be, a look at the node map will show that the Internet gateway and most reachable node is located on top of one building, NE43 at MIT. In fact this building is slated for demolition, and the network will be rearranged for that reason. Though this routing technology is robust, the underlying 802.11 layer is not, it is way to easy to jam and otherwise attack. But simulataneously DoSing enough nodes to take down the network would be a difficult task.
What's happening already is moving off of MIT's bandwidth. This will allow non-MIT people to use the network as well (people such as myself). We're planning on running this on our RoofServers and very soon Cambridge/Boston and realise the goals of BAWIA.
Let me tell you how much less: As low as $30/Mb/second/month for an ISP, though typically more (that price is for Cogent bandwidth, and they don't have the greatest network), but certainly pretty good quality bandwidth can be had for What I am getting at is that bandwidth for the big guys such as AOL is dirt cheap. Images hosted from LJ use such a small amount of bandwidth in the big picture, it's not worth worrying about. My guess is that there is some sort of policy decision that they are making. They're probably doing this to move people to their own blogg thing. As an ISP, this action is reprehensible. MSN's search engine results are bad enough, but then this? What is going to happen when everyone starts blocking access to their competitors? These are the end days, perhaps.
There were distributions in 92 that I used. SLS (Soft Landing) and Manchester Interim Release come to mind.
Has anyone been able to substantiate this supposed busts? SOunds like a way to get publicity/money.
1) a subpoena is not a bust. It means show up in court. And it can be fought on jurisdictional grounds. This is a prime EFF case.
2) Palestine doesn't have shit for infrastructure, I have difficulty believing anyone can have any sort of net connection there. First, Israel would destroy it. If not, the Islamist fundemanentalists would.
3) I've heard too many stories on the streets about hard times, etc, yea war veteran with three kids but I am off drugs, yadda yadda. Why should the net be any different? No I won't send you money. I'll send money to places that know a con job from the real thing and act appropriately.
If this is for real and you really have been shafted, my sincere hope that things get sorted out and you are cleared. But you need to think about how to do publicity in a way that doesn't make it seem like the nigerian scam.
>> When will you people learn that vegetarianism is the only way?
>Dear Eater of Grass,
>When we run out of prey.
>Sincerely,
>Carnivore
Ah, luckily yhe vegetarians were smart enough to invent mad cow disease, and other such things you've never heard of!
Go ahead, munch on your cattle entrails, don't think about where they came from. When you're gone, there will be more room for me.
Yes, this blackout is the best thing to happen to ham radio in a while. Maybe this stupid idea of broadband over power lines will finally be snipped.
Increased reliability? Try having your cards associate at slower speed, such as 5.5mbps rather than 11. Or 1 or 2 mbps.
This is the worst idea yet...I'd rather the RIAA was busting down doors looking for the crap that most people download, than have to give most of the RIAA 'artists', who are horrible musicians anyhow, any morney.
This is a guesstimate, but I have installed Linux (and some *BSD) boxes at various job sites without managements knowledge or permission, often on 'surplus' hardware (someones old PC sitting in a closet), for about 8 years now. Only about 1 in 60 of these was in some way countable by outsiders.
/etc/hosts file -- which was a comment. I think it was every 30 or 60 minutes or something. Years later, I was talking to a friend of mine who worked at a site that housed one of the root servers, and he was in a position to count how many of these queries came in...there were HUGE numbers. What is interesting is that we found that older versions of Red Hat also had this odd DNS behavoir, but that newer versions of RH and Slackware did not. So this was an interesting method of counting older installs of a few types of linux, but in the end not effective.
This starts to be the question, how is Linux counted? Three broad categories: media sales, net scans, and installation reports.
Media Sales - simple count up the sales reports from major vendors. Using this method alone, one would get an unrealisticly low estimate of Linux users. Though I have installed Linux on over 250 machines, I have only purchased CDs from a vendor twice (OpenBSD 2.7 and Slackware 3.3). I have purchased CDs from other sources: flea markets, computer stores, etc - but these are not 'official' pressings and probably are not counted.
Net Scans - Netcraft does a srvey to see what OS / web server various sites are using. WHile this is handy, a lot of the servers I have installed have not been accessible to the outside world, for security reasons. Ones that are available to the outside world have a limited number of services running, and a firewall (usually the Linux machine itself) for access control. So this still isn't accurate.
Installation Reports - Various OSs request permission to inform a central location of a new Linux installation upon the installs completion. The ease of this process varies quite a bit. I used to never report, out of general paranoia, but I have started to in the past few years. I think we all should. I also think that there needs to be a standard method on installtion counting and reporting: some way to determine if a specific install is actually an upgrade, a switch, or whatever, and a way to protect users' privacy, but give some good statistics about the install. For instance, it would be great to report the platform (including CPU type & speed, memory, HD space, peripheral cards) and even the package selections. I know this is what redhat does with their RH network stuff, and though some people may find it annoying and opt out it does provide useful information to help developers and businesspeople in their decisions about where to concentrate support resources.
Here's an interesting bit of historical trivia: Back years ago, mayb 1996 or so, I was running tcpdump and noticed some very strange DNS queries. Every so often my Slackware machine would query to root servers for what turned out to be the last line of my
There is no real shortage of IP address space. See my previous posts about this topic.
Has som interesting implications. Massive unemployment in China.
There's no shortage of IP space. The problem is really a political one. There is much space assigned to various US DoD organizations. At first glance, this is not surprising, as the Internet grew from Arpanet/Milnet. But now, most of this stuff for security reasons has moved off of the Internet, which is reasonable. Why haven't they turned in their allocations?
What's even worse, DoD actually was assigned, by IANA, two NEW class A spaces in 1998 (214.0.0.0 and 215.0.0.0 , i.e. 214/7) -- for WHAT REASON?
Something stinks at IANA.
I am also not very pleased with ARIN. They seem to exist to serve only themselves and huge corporations. Their fee structure is set up to crush the small ISPs. The yearly fee for small allocations is high, but in bulk it is almost a reasonable price, except when you figure out they're doing basically no work for $20k. I understand the technical reasons for wanting to aggregate IP space (simpler routing tables around the world), so they want end-users with 'portable' IP space to turn them in, or at least stop using them. Not so great for hobbyists and geeks who like to switch ISPs but keep their IP space.
ARIN needs to seriously stop being pricks to the small guys and start rethinking how to accomplish their goals. I have some ideas. But slashdot is no place to get into a technical discussion of this. Hell, I don't know if anyone is reading this who cares, or even would know what I was talking about.
People want to know why we can't do this in the US. Lots of finger pointing at telco greed (somewhat true) but there is more than just that, which is blocking such a revolution.
There is a huge difference between the highly connected and not areas in the US, due to the way technology has developed. Lots of fiber was put in the ground over the past ten years, fed by the expansion of telecom and datacom industries. Once the right-of-way has been purchased, the building permits acquired, the trenches dug and conduit layed, is is just a small bit more expensive to put in a lot of fiber than it is a little. So it wasn't uncommon to see 24 fibers where one would carry the traffic. This also provides some redundancy in case of failure.
You can get a lot of miles with small signal loss on fiber, but every time you splice it, there is a cost in both signal in addition to the economic. So the idea is to lay fiber to carry a lot of traffic to point B from point A, not stopping along the way.
The metallic plant (copper) is old and available and easier to splice, but has horrible performance. But this is fine if you are only going a couple of miles...most of the time. many times it can't even get that far (I am cursed with a crappy T1). Too expensive to run fiber out for everyone, splicing along the way.
So there was already all this capacity between places like New York and Boston and Washington DC, but a paucity to places like Burlington Vermont. Then there was all that 'dark fiber' that was kept in reserve, no signal going through it. But what exacerbated the situation was the development of DWDM technology, which made it possible to run much more data through each of these fibers by utilizing signals in bands that are closer together. But this equipment is expensive.
The end result is that bandwidth rich areas get richer, and the poor aren't helped at all. For an example of how bad this is, some years back the Massachusetts Turnpike Authority sold rights to run fiber down the 'pike, which stretches across the state east and west. This was very profitable in the densly populated eastern half of the state, dominated by Boston and the Rt.128 technology hub. But out in the western the hinterlands, that is across the Connecticut river and deep into area code 413, it wsn't seen as profitable. So the fiber did not run past Westfield, leaving the rest of the state left out and still with pokey, expensive, 1960s age technology. There was a great cry that again the rural population was being screwed, and a consortium was formed, called Berkshire Connect (http://www.bconnect.org) to take over the fiber rights and get western mass lit up. Unfortunately they teamed up with Global Crossing and they had many bankruptcy problems which slowed the project. But it is up and running, they've got 50 members they say, but I have no idea what the actual cost of connectivity is. I am sure it is much more expensive than what we pay in Boston.
I am not sure what can change this situation. Yes, government grants step in and throw some money around, but it will take a real lot to change the basic underlying economics. My guess is that the precipitous drop in the cost of equipment fiber, and real estate rights with the telecom market crash may bring prices into the affordable range, and maybe some local people are hired by the government as part of a public works project to put it all into the ground.
Then, there's microwave. But its reliability is an order of magnitude less than that of fiber.
In addition to the lack of information systems infrastructure, and more importantly, there is a lack of communications infrastructure. While there's no doubt that some big company (Worldcom?) who is friends of the Bush2 administration (like Halliburton) will get a multi-billion dollar contract to build a fiber network some time in the next couple of years, what does afganistan do RIGHT NOW?
Thomas Sailor wrote 'soundmodem' drivers for linux years back. These, used with other modules such as AX.25, allow for a medium distance (up to 200 miles) but low speed (9600 bps half duplex) link for CHEAP. An old Pentium 90 system is free in the US, so if they can be carted to afganistan cheaply, cost is no problem. VHF/UHF radio gear can be junked old Motorola (and other mfgrs) commercial/police radios which are reliable and available for almost nothing in the US, again the problem is carting the to afganistan. Antennas can be made out of wire.
of course I can't neglect 802.11b, as the throughput is much higher. But the distance is lower, and putting amplifiers and large antennas on 802.11b gear, and getting antennas at a decent height and aimed correctly, makes it more ambitious a project. But the great thing with 802.11b is you could have many VoIP telephone conversations going on at the same time.
The largest problem, as I see it, is power. I don't know what the electrical situation is there but I am sure it is pretty bad. I suppose there could be solar and wind power, but photovoltaic cells in particular are expensive and very likely to be stolen. Maybe just wind power then, made from junked automobile alternators. And bicycle power for an emergency.
Yeah, we can rebuild Afganistan. Now, how about Buffalo?
What's sad is, I knew what this code did immediately upon reading it. And didn't even have to consult my Beagle Brothers Peeks, Pokes, and Pointers chart.
I am not rich enough to have a IIgs, but I do have several ][e and ][+s. I even have the original flopy drive I got with my first ][+ in 1981!
Yeah, I've been doing this stuff for not quite 19 years but enough to tell BS from the real thing. Will somone post a link to a bittorrent of this thing, so I can download it, read it, and review?