i don't know all the legal details, but a class-action lawsuit was filed against pacific bell
(my local DSL provider) because of how bad their service is/was. that isn't just a few dissatisfied
customers complaining. that doesn't happen to cable providers.
Yes it does. @Home was sued within a year of going live because Fremont got so overloaded that access was slower than with a modem.
Project Pronto is on hold because the FCC is reviewing it. Seems that since the SLC isn't big enough to hold a DSLAM for everyone and his brother, it won't be allowed to hold a DSLAM for anyone.
Just to set the record straight, PacBell layed all those people off on its own before SBC bought them. The first thing SBC did when it came in was go on a mad hiring spree, "importing" technicians from all over North America. In the first two years of SBC running P*B, the average time to install a T1 went from 90 days to 3 days (That's installation, after all the ordering process is finished and the ticket is in the system).
I agree that the RBOCs and ILECs tend to suck, but let's keep it straight who we're blaming for what.
Agreed -- I currently use several 486's to provide services, but I'll be consolidating them onto my existing workstation when I upgrade, in order to minimize power usage.
Of course, since I generally buy well behind the hardware curve my server will still be considered underpowered:-) K6-2 @ 450 Mhz.
OTOH, there's no reason why you can't keep
around an old distribution of Linux based
on a 2.0 or 2.2 kernel and use that for
your old hardware.
Ummm... security????? No, it's not okay to leave it alone if it ain't broken, because that's the box which will be rooted by some well documented two year old security hole because those are the holes the script kiddies will find first.
Forking's not a big deal in my mind if it's handled properly (i.e. there is a clear distinction in everyone's mind between PC-Linux and Iron-Linux). If Iron-Linux refuses to install without >1GB RAM, that will help:-)
But I think it's very important that a recent distribution of Linux always be around which will run on a fifty dollar PC.
"Previously, you've had to make these record-breaking decisions on your own, relying on perplexing intangibilities like 'taste' and 'intuition.' But now, there's a better way. This cut is scientifically designed to break on radio -- and it will, sooner or later. For the station that breaks it first, the benefits are obvious: yes, no matter what share of this crazy market you do business in, you lead the pack."
--The brilliant Negativland, from "Escape from Noise". I find it sickening and amusing that now, some fifteen years after its release, parts of this little tag are used in jingles and station IDs. Bastards. They'll get my attention as an "edgy" station when they play the whole album!!
And then a nifty virus would rearrange all your ID3 tags:-)
I don't think anything this complex is really necessary or helpful, because it's still genre-ized. What do you do with Willie Nelson, who is a country star but is far different from the current "country" genre? What do you do with the Elvis Costello album "Almost Blue" (a collection of country covers in EC&theA style)?
Pipe dream, but this would be cool: XMMS button labeled "world-playlist" that randomly grabs a song off of Napster or a streaming MP3 site. First you get Taal, then you get Negativland, then you get the Pixies, then you get an Israeli newsmagazine. If you don't like what you get, hit next. Of course this assumes a really good streaming technology (damn it's getting good now, though -- my mother-in-law listens to ballgames on RealAudio now because the sound is better than AM radio) or unlimited instant bandwidth to anywhere in the world.
(2) Stations don't play songs that aren't popular (at least not for long). If the song doesn't have an appreciable fan-base, it doesn't get played nearly as often as the latest pablum from boy-bands or teenage-blond-singer-of-the-week.
Is this really true? Can anyone verify? My dark fantasy is that they really don't pay any attention to what the audience thinks -- rather, the record company pays the radio station to push these ten pablum crap songs until the audience gives in and buys it because it's all they ever hear and the backbeat is kinda catchy. I think the format is structured like this: for every ten songs, five are "classics" for the genre, two are current songs placed by audience feedback, and three are pushed by the record company. "Classics" are the biggest pool because of time, but the pool is nothing like the pool of the genre the radio station purports to play.
Well, I can take out some of my Linux systems nicely in a similar fashion -- granted, it was just X or something on it that hung, but if you can't access the keyboard and mouse... is it faster to use another machine to SSH in and kill X or is it faster to reboot and let fsck do its work? A is faster when I have a KVM, B is faster when I use ReiserFS. But high uptime is only for my server systems -- workstations get rebooted, because that's where I do the stuff that causes crashes (testing lots of programs and pushing the hardware hard).
Bull. They may feel like that when they buy the license, but they quickly find that the phone support is useless and Microsoft is just as hard as everthing else. It may have a pretty GUI to point-n-click through, but a fat lot of good that does when clicking Okay causes "VBScript Error 10234: Expected CallScratchMyButtWithAStick and saw CallGagMeWithASpoon at line 143."
I did a lot of work with these small companies once upon a time, and I might still be interested in doing it if they were running Linux and I could reach their boxes by modem or SSH in the event of most problems.
That must be why there are so many orphaned GUI mail clients on freshmeat. This is one of my biggest annoyances with my current computing lifestyle -- I have to use ssh and pine for decent mail (Netscape is the only other choice and is okay if you're doing POP. IMAP only works on LANs though, tons of timeouts req. ALT-Q or kill -9 if you're modeming). Pine/mutt is a great way to do mail, don't get me wrong -- but attachments bite the big one because they mean that I need to:
a) use fetchmail and keep all my mail on the local client (again, big PITA when modeming)
b) save the attachments, and scp them to my local client, then open them.
Balsa/Spruce is promising, but still lacks a lot when compared to Netscape. I think Mozilla offers the most hope right now, though I'll check out Magellan -- this is enough to swing my affections back to KDE. Well, this plus some annoying slowness/stability problems with Sawfish. Too bad the best window managers (Enlightenment for high end machines and XFCE for low end machines) are such a pain to configure. I love using them, but setting them up on a new box takes forever. But that's another thread...
If you like RPM-based distros, Mandrake is the best -- specifically MandrakeUpdate, which does exactly what you ask. Then there's RedHat's up2date, which reliably crashes 75% through doing what you ask. Then there's Debian's apt-get, which is not for the impatient but certainly has its adherents.
Best of all, there's rpmfind --latest and a little bit of shell script.
>Think about it - Explorer is *much* slower than MC, but you seem to think it's a good
design.
Actually, Explorer is much faster than MC because I don't have to use the cursor keys to tick through one item at a time -- I can zoom to it with a mouse. Same benefit with GMC of course, but GMC is slower than Explorer in terms of responsiveness (probably because X and GTK and Imlib anf GNOME and so on are running in userspace).
1) MSIE is componentized as well.
2) You make claims about power and ease-of-use based on some screenshots. Is this because the icons are prettier than MSIE's? Seems to me you can't talk about either property without having used the system to do something.
3) I agree that there is utility in blending functionality within a single GUI. But there is much greater utility in the command line because the command line can be utilized remotely, over a modem if need be, with very little loss of power or responsiveness. The UI you choose depends on the purpose for which you are using the system. If you're using it to replace a bunch of Windows terminals, then Nautilus is for you.
The shorter answer is Konqueror. I don't use KDE often, but when I do I am forced to notice that it already offers this functionality. BTW Eazel, the fact that I don't use KDE often is partly due to the fact that it offers this functionality. The only things wrong with GMC are:
no button to show/hide dotfiles
slow performance.
Re:Katz writes about things without having 2 clues
on
Selfish Society
·
· Score: 2
Thank you.
I started working my way up in this loose conglomerate called geekdom _because_ it was a meritocracy (though the -cracy part is questionable -- what do we rule?). My liberal arts education at a prestigious university showed me conclusively that art is dead. So, if I can't achieve success through merit in the dead field of art to which I was originally called, I'll look for a field in which merit is appreciated.
My skills are appreciated in geekdom, whereas in liberal arts they were viewed as threatening and disruptive. I don't know about you JonKatz, but I'd rather put my efforts into a field where they are appreciated. It's unfortunate that much of society is more concerned with polite appearances than with merit, but someone's got to run things. You don't want your highways designed by nice people who lack clues but give good meeting.
I'd like a good mail client from Mozilla because the only halfway decent GUI mail client for Linux is Netscape's and it's not very good. I use Pine, but I have my non-geek family and friends on Netscape Mail because it can filter without the pain of procmail and handle attachments more easily than V S E Y Y xpdf filename.
Kmail bites, though I'll be checking out the one in 2.0. Arrow is promising but scrolling is about a pixel per second. I would never unleash Balsa on someone who just wants the computer to work -- it is alpha. Postillion? TkRat? Mahogany? Exmh? Again, not for a real end-user.
Bingo -- 7x24 platinum plated super-duper on-site tech support from 37 vendors is no substitute for proper diagnostics. You designed the system with help from their SEs, now you're supporting the system with help from their techs. It's up to you to manage and direct their efforts.
If you don't want any responsibility in this, then you can outsource the entire effort to a managed service company. But don't be surprised when the CFO starts asking what it is that you do for your paycheck.
Hear hear -- I'm level three installation support at a company which makes a complex networking software product, which is necessarily dependent on a bunch of other complex software products and operating systems. The methods described above are the difference between a support "issue" (opened and closed with a minimum of bleeding) and a support nightmare (massive cranial bloodloss for all parties concerned).
You are dealing with individuals -- people who may have a multistate territory, people who might or might not have been well-trained, people who might or might not have natural aptitude for their job. They'll do a lot better if you gently steer them toward the problem and help them be calm and logical about it.
Support people, especially field support, see the worst side of their customers and the products they support. They might secretly (or not so) think that you are a moron and the product they support is a buggy POS. If you're being unpleasant, they'll act to get you off of their desk quickly, which means run through the flowchart looking for interaction with other products. As soon as interaction is found, they'll tell you to go double check it and hope that you call back after their shift is over.
Agreed. I don't buy DVD discs or drives. I'm not going to either, because I don't think high-definition video is worth giving up my rights of fair use in my own home.
That's IDSL you're looking at. It works well, and the price does include the circuit but probably doesn't include the ISP services (mail, &c). I'm paying $103 for my IDSL, and I suspect I live very close to you. Foxworthy CO?
Anyway, I'm avoiding big ISP's. As an ex-Bell employee working on large DSL projects for Silicon Valley companies, I am familiar with the processes at Covad, P*B, and Northpoint. None of them gives a rat's ass about any single DSL user, but all of them will jump real fast if the user is a tester for a big company.
I want DNS, I want shell access, I want some flexibility and responsiveness. So I use a small mom-n-pop called rawbandwidth.com. It's been four months and I've had no problems at all.
Slashdot Mirror
i don't know all the legal details, but a class-action lawsuit was filed against pacific bell
(my local DSL provider) because of how bad their service is/was. that isn't just a few dissatisfied
customers complaining. that doesn't happen to cable providers.
Yes it does. @Home was sued within a year of going live because Fremont got so overloaded that access was slower than with a modem.
Not exactly...
ISDN and IDSL use the same LLC encoding, but in IDSL you don't have the D and B channels -- just one big PVC at 144kbps.
Project Pronto is on hold because the FCC is reviewing it. Seems that since the SLC isn't big enough to hold a DSLAM for everyone and his brother, it won't be allowed to hold a DSLAM for anyone.
Just to set the record straight, PacBell layed all those people off on its own before SBC bought them. The first thing SBC did when it came in was go on a mad hiring spree, "importing" technicians from all over North America. In the first two years of SBC running P*B, the average time to install a T1 went from 90 days to 3 days (That's installation, after all the ordering process is finished and the ticket is in the system).
I agree that the RBOCs and ILECs tend to suck, but let's keep it straight who we're blaming for what.
Agreed -- I currently use several 486's to provide services, but I'll be consolidating them onto my existing workstation when I upgrade, in order to minimize power usage.
:-) K6-2 @ 450 Mhz.
Of course, since I generally buy well behind the hardware curve my server will still be considered underpowered
OTOH, there's no reason why you can't keep
:-)
around an old distribution of Linux based
on a 2.0 or 2.2 kernel and use that for
your old hardware.
Ummm... security????? No, it's not okay to leave it alone if it ain't broken, because that's the box which will be rooted by some well documented two year old security hole because those are the holes the script kiddies will find first.
Forking's not a big deal in my mind if it's handled properly (i.e. there is a clear distinction in everyone's mind between PC-Linux and Iron-Linux). If Iron-Linux refuses to install without >1GB RAM, that will help
But I think it's very important that a recent distribution of Linux always be around which will run on a fifty dollar PC.
That won't help with a proxy.
"Previously, you've had to make these record-breaking decisions on your own, relying on perplexing intangibilities like 'taste' and 'intuition.' But now, there's a better way. This cut is scientifically designed to break on radio -- and it will, sooner or later. For the station that breaks it first, the benefits are obvious: yes, no matter what share of this crazy market you do business in, you lead the pack."
--The brilliant Negativland, from "Escape from Noise". I find it sickening and amusing that now, some fifteen years after its release, parts of this little tag are used in jingles and station IDs. Bastards. They'll get my attention as an "edgy" station when they play the whole album!!
And then a nifty virus would rearrange all your ID3 tags :-)
I don't think anything this complex is really necessary or helpful, because it's still genre-ized. What do you do with Willie Nelson, who is a country star but is far different from the current "country" genre? What do you do with the Elvis Costello album "Almost Blue" (a collection of country covers in EC&theA style)?
Pipe dream, but this would be cool: XMMS button labeled "world-playlist" that randomly grabs a song off of Napster or a streaming MP3 site. First you get Taal, then you get Negativland, then you get the Pixies, then you get an Israeli newsmagazine. If you don't like what you get, hit next. Of course this assumes a really good streaming technology (damn it's getting good now, though -- my mother-in-law listens to ballgames on RealAudio now because the sound is better than AM radio) or unlimited instant bandwidth to anywhere in the world.
(2) Stations don't play songs that aren't popular (at least not for long). If the song doesn't have an appreciable fan-base, it doesn't get played nearly as often as the latest pablum from boy-bands or teenage-blond-singer-of-the-week. Is this really true? Can anyone verify? My dark fantasy is that they really don't pay any attention to what the audience thinks -- rather, the record company pays the radio station to push these ten pablum crap songs until the audience gives in and buys it because it's all they ever hear and the backbeat is kinda catchy. I think the format is structured like this: for every ten songs, five are "classics" for the genre, two are current songs placed by audience feedback, and three are pushed by the record company. "Classics" are the biggest pool because of time, but the pool is nothing like the pool of the genre the radio station purports to play.
Well, I can take out some of my Linux systems nicely in a similar fashion -- granted, it was just X or something on it that hung, but if you can't access the keyboard and mouse... is it faster to use another machine to SSH in and kill X or is it faster to reboot and let fsck do its work? A is faster when I have a KVM, B is faster when I use ReiserFS. But high uptime is only for my server systems -- workstations get rebooted, because that's where I do the stuff that causes crashes (testing lots of programs and pushing the hardware hard).
Bull. They may feel like that when they buy the license, but they quickly find that the phone support is useless and Microsoft is just as hard as everthing else. It may have a pretty GUI to point-n-click through, but a fat lot of good that does when clicking Okay causes "VBScript Error 10234: Expected CallScratchMyButtWithAStick and saw CallGagMeWithASpoon at line 143." I did a lot of work with these small companies once upon a time, and I might still be interested in doing it if they were running Linux and I could reach their boxes by modem or SSH in the event of most problems.
That must be why there are so many orphaned GUI mail clients on freshmeat. This is one of my biggest annoyances with my current computing lifestyle -- I have to use ssh and pine for decent mail (Netscape is the only other choice and is okay if you're doing POP. IMAP only works on LANs though, tons of timeouts req. ALT-Q or kill -9 if you're modeming). Pine/mutt is a great way to do mail, don't get me wrong -- but attachments bite the big one because they mean that I need to:
a) use fetchmail and keep all my mail on the local client (again, big PITA when modeming)
b) save the attachments, and scp them to my local client, then open them.
Balsa/Spruce is promising, but still lacks a lot when compared to Netscape. I think Mozilla offers the most hope right now, though I'll check out Magellan -- this is enough to swing my affections back to KDE. Well, this plus some annoying slowness/stability problems with Sawfish. Too bad the best window managers (Enlightenment for high end machines and XFCE for low end machines) are such a pain to configure. I love using them, but setting them up on a new box takes forever. But that's another thread...
If you like RPM-based distros, Mandrake is the best -- specifically MandrakeUpdate, which does exactly what you ask. Then there's RedHat's up2date, which reliably crashes 75% through doing what you ask. Then there's Debian's apt-get, which is not for the impatient but certainly has its adherents.
Best of all, there's rpmfind --latest and a little bit of shell script.
>Think about it - Explorer is *much* slower than MC, but you seem to think it's a good
design.
Actually, Explorer is much faster than MC because I don't have to use the cursor keys to tick through one item at a time -- I can zoom to it with a mouse. Same benefit with GMC of course, but GMC is slower than Explorer in terms of responsiveness (probably because X and GTK and Imlib anf GNOME and so on are running in userspace).
nice attempt at flame, but hell, I'll bite.
1) MSIE is componentized as well.
2) You make claims about power and ease-of-use based on some screenshots. Is this because the icons are prettier than MSIE's? Seems to me you can't talk about either property without having used the system to do something.
3) I agree that there is utility in blending functionality within a single GUI. But there is much greater utility in the command line because the command line can be utilized remotely, over a modem if need be, with very little loss of power or responsiveness. The UI you choose depends on the purpose for which you are using the system. If you're using it to replace a bunch of Windows terminals, then Nautilus is for you.
The shorter answer is Konqueror. I don't use KDE often, but when I do I am forced to notice that it already offers this functionality. BTW Eazel, the fact that I don't use KDE often is partly due to the fact that it offers this functionality. The only things wrong with GMC are:
no button to show/hide dotfiles
slow performance.
Thank you.
I started working my way up in this loose conglomerate called geekdom _because_ it was a meritocracy (though the -cracy part is questionable -- what do we rule?). My liberal arts education at a prestigious university showed me conclusively that art is dead. So, if I can't achieve success through merit in the dead field of art to which I was originally called, I'll look for a field in which merit is appreciated.
My skills are appreciated in geekdom, whereas in liberal arts they were viewed as threatening and disruptive. I don't know about you JonKatz, but I'd rather put my efforts into a field where they are appreciated. It's unfortunate that much of society is more concerned with polite appearances than with merit, but someone's got to run things. You don't want your highways designed by nice people who lack clues but give good meeting.
I'd like a good mail client from Mozilla because the only halfway decent GUI mail client for Linux is Netscape's and it's not very good. I use Pine, but I have my non-geek family and friends on Netscape Mail because it can filter without the pain of procmail and handle attachments more easily than V S E Y Y xpdf filename.
Kmail bites, though I'll be checking out the one in 2.0. Arrow is promising but scrolling is about a pixel per second. I would never unleash Balsa on someone who just wants the computer to work -- it is alpha. Postillion? TkRat? Mahogany? Exmh? Again, not for a real end-user.
Something of Pan's quality, but for mail.
Bingo -- 7x24 platinum plated super-duper on-site tech support from 37 vendors is no substitute for proper diagnostics. You designed the system with help from their SEs, now you're supporting the system with help from their techs. It's up to you to manage and direct their efforts.
If you don't want any responsibility in this, then you can outsource the entire effort to a managed service company. But don't be surprised when the CFO starts asking what it is that you do for your paycheck.
Hear hear -- I'm level three installation support at a company which makes a complex networking software product, which is necessarily dependent on a bunch of other complex software products and operating systems. The methods described above are the difference between a support "issue" (opened and closed with a minimum of bleeding) and a support nightmare (massive cranial bloodloss for all parties concerned).
You are dealing with individuals -- people who may have a multistate territory, people who might or might not have been well-trained, people who might or might not have natural aptitude for their job. They'll do a lot better if you gently steer them toward the problem and help them be calm and logical about it.
Support people, especially field support, see the worst side of their customers and the products they support. They might secretly (or not so) think that you are a moron and the product they support is a buggy POS. If you're being unpleasant, they'll act to get you off of their desk quickly, which means run through the flowchart looking for interaction with other products. As soon as interaction is found, they'll tell you to go double check it and hope that you call back after their shift is over.
In fact, didn't Jon Postel cause a big fuss by doing exactly that a couple of years ago?
Agreed. I don't buy DVD discs or drives. I'm not going to either, because I don't think high-definition video is worth giving up my rights of fair use in my own home.
I'm using ResierFS on the /home partition of my laptop, and it handles power failure, droppage, and other insults like a tank.
That's IDSL you're looking at. It works well, and the price does include the circuit but probably doesn't include the ISP services (mail, &c). I'm paying $103 for my IDSL, and I suspect I live very close to you. Foxworthy CO?
Anyway, I'm avoiding big ISP's. As an ex-Bell employee working on large DSL projects for Silicon Valley companies, I am familiar with the processes at Covad, P*B, and Northpoint. None of them gives a rat's ass about any single DSL user, but all of them will jump real fast if the user is a tester for a big company.
I want DNS, I want shell access, I want some flexibility and responsiveness. So I use a small mom-n-pop called rawbandwidth.com. It's been four months and I've had no problems at all.