I have a domain hosted with pair.com and I've found them to be extremely helpful and efficient. On several occasions I have emailed them about various issues and without fail I have received a reply within a few hours (i'm in australia, they aren't - that's impressive). I regard anything below a day to be an exceptional turnaround, and I am a happy customer because of this.
The only downtime was a planned outage when pair.com relocated its equipment to a new facility to allow for more growth. This was made known to me well in advance and only lasted for a couple of hours.
My only wish is that custom cgi was included in the hosting package, but given the small amount that i'm paying per month i am not disappointed with what I'm receiving. The opposite is the case. My web site is a hobby and ego thing, nothing more, and i wouldn't expend more than a minimal sum to maintain it.
I have dealt with various commercial sites in the past and present, and i am well aware of the impact that "mission critical" outages can cause to customers and businesses. I am confident in pair's abilities and seriousness about the job, and would feel quite comfortable putting the hosting for a commercial venture in their hands.
Re:Look at the submission date on this article
on
When Does Y2K Begin?
·
· Score: 2
Of course you do realise that 00:00:00 would be the start of the day.. so your post was dated this morning, new years eve and not new years day.
Oh, and while i'm at it the new millenium begins 2001! That's not stopping me from wearing my "Fuck the Millenium" tshirt tonight though... and i get to recycle it next year!
Who cares? Every organisation worth a damn has people on call for days after the rollover. I don't believe anything serious is going to happen in countries like Australia, the UK and the US. If it does, well, I welcome the oncoming of our new insect overlords.
Factoring GMT into the equation just gives me an extra moment to watch for this nothing to happen.
I'm on call for the whole thing - I won't be paged, it'll be a cruisy night.
I'm just concerned with stocking up on alcohol and pre-booking my stomach pumping.
I am stocked up with several cases of Carlton Cold, a fine Australian brew, for myself and friends.
My black CK jeans are hanging over a nearby chair, next to my "Fuck the Millenium" tshirt, which incidentally took 2 months to arrive after I ordered it online.
I'll be reporting events live from Sydney, one of the early entrants to Y2K, to various folk around the globe. What bigger media event than the appocalypse?
Actually I'm looking forward to a good dose of rioting. And looting. Contemplated what you'd go for? Fancy some new clothes that you really don't want to spend the money on? How about expanding your cd collection. Perhaps one of those juicy Toshiba laptops you've been drooling over? mine runs linux great.
Or maybe you'll just take the flexible option and go for cash? Hey sure, that's how I've always done it.
The problem is we don't have the right.
on
Profiling A Nation
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· Score: 1
Disclaimer: This started out as a response and turned into a bit of a rant, though I believe I've made my point adequately.
I think this is fair if a consumer has the right to see everything in the database under his name and delete it if he so wishes.
The problem is that we don't have the right and the government will not doing anything useful on its own initiative. The only good thing that I've seen from the current government is the intervention in the East Timor situation. Prior to this in the same term John Howard's government has screwed the university students over and allowed Brian Harradine, the 80-something year old codger from out-of-touch-with-reality-ville Tasmania, to force the draconian internet censorship laws through parliament. While this is a little off topic, I've always been a Liberal supporter because I believed that they had a genuine ability to do good for the country and repair some of the damage that has (arguably) been done as a result of the Labor governments over the last 10 years of their reign. If I was willing to stay in a country run by this bunch of dickheads any longer, next election I would be voting for National party, whose members were part of the few to oppose the censorship laws.
I digress.. The government seems willing to good, but lacks any clue on modern issues and relies on its anachronistic values to pull it through contemporary decisions - and in my judgement it is failing miserably. On issues in the public eye it is quick to action, not necessarily the right action but action so it is seen as acting. On peripheral issues it lacks the willingness or ability to do anything beyond burp and stutter, then pass some bet hedging legislation that ends up screwing the people over that it is supposedly there to protect.
Back to the issue at hand.. Australians have voluntarily been contributing to such schemes for years. Fly Buys is the best example. For those non-Australians here, Fly Buys is a scheme where when purchasing from any number of stores you use your Fly Buys card to accrue frequent flier miles (this seems to be the generic currency of such schemes) which may then be used to exchange for goods and services (anything from televisions to plane tickets). Does anyone believe that Fly Buys exists cause the big companys want to give away televisions and send you on holidays? Does anyone believe that there really is value in purchasing based on the gain of Fly Buys and not purchasing cheaper from a competitor? Unfortunately there are people that believe one or both of those options. Fly Buys exists for the sake of convenience of companies involved in the Fly Buys scheme. When you purchase a tank of petrol, it's recorded. When you buy the bag of kity litter from the Supermarket, it's recorded. When you buy a set of kids clothes from David Jones (like Maceys in the US?), it's recorded. Then X company does the numbers and figures it's a family household and send its brochures about Dreamworld holidays to you just in time for summer. Maybe this is a convenience for you, maybe not. Myself, I dislike being spammed, no matter how close to my interests it may be, and I dislike it even more when the spam appears in my mailbox with my name on it. I only want to receive what I've requested, and that should be the default option for anyone.
MUDs are an interesting phenomenon. I believe a lot of the reason behind the popularity of muds, and to some extent talkers, is the way in which communication takes place.
MUDs to the greater extent take off where BBSs ended. Typically, users of BBS systems were geographically located in the same area. I met several people from different BBSes over a period of a couple of years. MUDs simulate this 'closeness' through a 'virtual physical world' (yay, a paradox!) where the inhabitant is drawn into the online 'reality' to interact in any number of ways with the environment and other inhabitants. If you allow yourself to bridge the imagination gap then to be part of this type of online community can be quite rewarding.
I've made a lot of friends on Fractal Edge over the last three years and travelled to the US (i'm from australia) earlier this year and met a dozen of them.
...and don't be forgetting the Australians. There's a space base way up north that does various launches. I do not believe it has sent people up as yet, but in any case we've contributed Australian astronauts to the American space program in addition to our other contributions.
Give your servers a bit of an international feel, next time they get some high powered boxen give them Aussie beer names. Only the beast machines mind you, Aussie beer is the good stuff;)
Hahn, Carlton, Boags and Tooheys are a good start. If you have a 386 out the back somewhere name it Fosters. (we don't drink this shit, why do you think we send it to you lot?).
I have two machines at home, DeiMoS and PHoBoS, the names of Mars' two moons. I did this some time ago and have since had a few other machines come and go while these have stayed. Saturn and Jupiter have gone to work and Pluto is currently deceased awaiting resurrection.
I like the idea of using JRR Tolkien's characters as machine names. Gandalf the grey, the wise wizard, is clearly cut out to be a DNS, Bilbo, the homely one, is a great web server. Troll is the firewall, and I'm sure i could pick out a good dwarf name for the radius server...
I started using BladeEnc on windows and when I went full time to linux tried out a couple of encoders before going back to BladeEnc. It has consistently shown itself to be of exceptional speed and quality.
Recently I ripped my modest collection of 25 albums over a period of a few days using ripit, a perl script which does a cddb lookup of the tracks, rips them, and then encodes them with bladeenc or lame.
I wouldn't consider ripping a cd collection without cddb these days, after doing it the easy way it would be far too painful to do it manually.
I am not sure that this applies equally well in this situation. Have a look at it this way. As things are there are two major providers of instant messaging software/service - AOL with its AIM client, and Mirabilis with its ICQ client. These are both proprietary systems developed closed source and have individually built up a huge user base. Various open source clients for both the ICQ and AIM services have appeared over time, (such as micq, licq, gtkicq, gaim, etc) which have all offered many of the features of the standard versions. The problem with the idea of open source servers is that Mirabilis and AOL would be openly supporting the fragmentation of their hard won user bases. As things are they are not even offering binaries of their server software, and I imagine they are not going to change this in the near future. Making the server side software source (say that ten times real fast!) open would likely result in a large number of additional IM services arising, which is not necessarily a bad thing in and of itself. It would essentially be like irc, with the ICQ/AIM user selecting a server to log onto when they launch the client, which they must have registered with in advance. The obvious downside of this, from a user point of view, is that you may have a number of friends scattered across different servers, who may in turn be stuck using their owns servers because of what their friends have been using. Open source can have good and bad consequences, in this case I am not sure that it is the way to go as the usefulness of ICQ/AIM services depends on them being used by everyone.
The media has always been about supplying what the public wants to view, and this is something that is continued to this day. Many people I have talked to recently regarding the plane crash have taken the viewpoint that the media should show some modicum of responsibility for the content that it provides the public, rather than sensationalising that which they know will draw public attention.
A lot of people complain about the crap that is aired on the media and the lack of substantial content that is immediately relevant to our own lives, but do we really want the media telling us what is relevant to us? I am happy with things the way they are, I see nothing but fluff in the daily news each night, crowd drawing spectaculars of fire and noise and death, but I am happy feeling that this is not important to me, that instead of attempting to tell me what I should know, they are showing what they think people will watch. We are in the James Cameron era, where wonderful light and sound and camera angles emotional traps are commonplace and are the magic which the media uses to draw its crowds.
The media is the new cinema - watch it, listen to what it says, but don't allow them to tell you what is important.
Having the extra competition is going to be a great thing for Australians, who up until now have had little competition in the local call market, and not a great deal more in long distance. About the only thing that has seriously challenged the (few) telcos in Australia is various online service providers introducing Voice Over IP communications, such as OzEmail Phone, which I often use myself.
My concern is that Telstra's provision of services to third parties to resell will result in a great degradation of service for those wishing to use phone lines for data services.
At present Telstra's PSTN network in certain suburban and country areas uses compression of voice channels when in peak usage periods in order to avoid rolling out new equipment to increase the base capacity. eg. if each street block has a 2Mbps pipe to the Telstra network, two blocks may have only 3Mbps between them, One each and one shared between them. In peak periods when this overlap is required by both blocks the Big Box on the corner starts chopping off bits and pieces to fit it all through. While this doesn't seriously degrade a voice call this is guaranteed to destroy any attempt a modem will have to communicate with the outside world.
If Telstra starts selling of its already obviously limited bandwidth, where then is the consumer left who wishes to get online? This is obviously something that must be done in order to open up the market, but in the interim how much will Joe Net-User suffer?
I reckon that the internet should be treated as an international entity and that if this is accepted as being the case then NSI can't really be taken to the US courts since, as has been pointed out, the US can't rule over international dealings.
Beyond this though i feel that NSI is looking at this thing the wrong way. It appears that selectively doling out domain names is NSI's way of telling us that to be given anything from them is a blessing. As NSI essentially has complete control over domain names they have an obligation to the internet as a whole not to judge, but merely to serve.
Another reader posted a link to the George Carlin 7 deadly words transcript which points out, in its fashion, that many words are not dirty unless taken in context. NSI may take it upon itself to disallow registration of domains with "indecent" language but if the courts find that they are allowed to filter out certain words, what is to stop them from selectively banning registration and registration renewal of phrases that they may consider to be indecent?
A friend of mine owns Jesus-Sucks-Dick.com which, if NSI continues on its current path, is almost certain to die off when it comes up for renewal.
Going a step further, though i doubt this will happen, what is to stop NSI from denying registration renewal to those sites which have objectionable content. I sincerely doubt that this will happen, but then it is only one more leap in logic
Not a monopoly for much longer. MCI Worldcom is buying out OzEmail and will be implementing its own infrastructure including everything from local phone lines to cross ocean wide bandwidth links. Don't forget Optus, Connect and OzEmail also have overseas links of their own at this time and Optus also offers local calls in many areas.
Aaah, I love the smell of deregulation in the morning. It smells like... purgatory.
If you read my comment again you will see that I suggested that LT might be able to build working winmodems with Ascend's technology. Hell, they could probably build better winmodems with Pizza Hut's technology...
Hey maybe with LT getting some new tech they will be able to build their el cheapo winmodems with actual functionality! From the troubles I have providing tech support for winmodems I certainly hope so. I'm not the only one. winmodems.org
Slashdot Mirror
I have a domain hosted with pair.com and I've found them to be extremely helpful and efficient. On several occasions I have emailed them about various issues and without fail I have received a reply within a few hours (i'm in australia, they aren't - that's impressive). I regard anything below a day to be an exceptional turnaround, and I am a happy customer because of this.
The only downtime was a planned outage when pair.com relocated its equipment to a new facility to allow for more growth. This was made known to me well in advance and only lasted for a couple of hours.
My only wish is that custom cgi was included in the hosting package, but given the small amount that i'm paying per month i am not disappointed with what I'm receiving. The opposite is the case. My web site is a hobby and ego thing, nothing more, and i wouldn't expend more than a minimal sum to maintain it.
I have dealt with various commercial sites in the past and present, and i am well aware of the impact that "mission critical" outages can cause to customers and businesses. I am confident in pair's abilities and seriousness about the job, and would feel quite comfortable putting the hosting for a commercial venture in their hands.
Of course you do realise that 00:00:00 would be the start of the day.. so your post was dated this morning, new years eve and not new years day.
Oh, and while i'm at it the new millenium begins 2001! That's not stopping me from wearing my "Fuck the Millenium" tshirt tonight though... and i get to recycle it next year!
Who cares? Every organisation worth a damn has people on call for days after the rollover. I don't believe anything serious is going to happen in countries like Australia, the UK and the US. If it does, well, I welcome the oncoming of our new insect overlords.
Factoring GMT into the equation just gives me an extra moment to watch for this nothing to happen.
I'm on call for the whole thing - I won't be paged, it'll be a cruisy night.
I'm just concerned with stocking up on alcohol and pre-booking my stomach pumping.
I'm set, prepped and kitted up for a big one.
I am stocked up with several cases of Carlton Cold, a fine Australian brew, for myself and friends.
My black CK jeans are hanging over a nearby chair, next to my "Fuck the Millenium" tshirt, which incidentally took 2 months to arrive after I ordered it online.
I'll be reporting events live from Sydney, one of the early entrants to Y2K, to various folk around the globe. What bigger media event than the appocalypse?
Actually I'm looking forward to a good dose of rioting. And looting. Contemplated what you'd go for? Fancy some new clothes that you really don't want to spend the money on? How about expanding your cd collection. Perhaps one of those juicy Toshiba laptops you've been drooling over? mine runs linux great.
Or maybe you'll just take the flexible option and go for cash? Hey sure, that's how I've always done it.
http://technology.news.com.au/news/4 262081.htm
Disclaimer: This started out as a response and turned into a bit of a rant, though I believe I've made my point adequately.
I think this is fair if a consumer has the right to see everything in the database under his name and delete it if he so wishes.
The problem is that we don't have the right and the government will not doing anything useful on its own initiative. The only good thing that I've seen from the current government is the intervention in the East Timor situation. Prior to this in the same term John Howard's government has screwed the university students over and allowed Brian Harradine, the 80-something year old codger from out-of-touch-with-reality-ville Tasmania, to force the draconian internet censorship laws through parliament. While this is a little off topic, I've always been a Liberal supporter because I believed that they had a genuine ability to do good for the country and repair some of the damage that has (arguably) been done as a result of the Labor governments over the last 10 years of their reign. If I was willing to stay in a country run by this bunch of dickheads any longer, next election I would be voting for National party, whose members were part of the few to oppose the censorship laws.
I digress.. The government seems willing to good, but lacks any clue on modern issues and relies on its anachronistic values to pull it through contemporary decisions - and in my judgement it is failing miserably. On issues in the public eye it is quick to action, not necessarily the right action but action so it is seen as acting. On peripheral issues it lacks the willingness or ability to do anything beyond burp and stutter, then pass some bet hedging legislation that ends up screwing the people over that it is supposedly there to protect.
Back to the issue at hand.. Australians have voluntarily been contributing to such schemes for years. Fly Buys is the best example. For those non-Australians here, Fly Buys is a scheme where when purchasing from any number of stores you use your Fly Buys card to accrue frequent flier miles (this seems to be the generic currency of such schemes) which may then be used to exchange for goods and services (anything from televisions to plane tickets). Does anyone believe that Fly Buys exists cause the big companys want to give away televisions and send you on holidays? Does anyone believe that there really is value in purchasing based on the gain of Fly Buys and not purchasing cheaper from a competitor? Unfortunately there are people that believe one or both of those options. Fly Buys exists for the sake of convenience of companies involved in the Fly Buys scheme. When you purchase a tank of petrol, it's recorded. When you buy the bag of kity litter from the Supermarket, it's recorded. When you buy a set of kids clothes from David Jones (like Maceys in the US?), it's recorded. Then X company does the numbers and figures it's a family household and send its brochures about Dreamworld holidays to you just in time for summer. Maybe this is a convenience for you, maybe not. Myself, I dislike being spammed, no matter how close to my interests it may be, and I dislike it even more when the spam appears in my mailbox with my name on it. I only want to receive what I've requested, and that should be the default option for anyone.
MUDs are an interesting phenomenon. I believe a lot of the reason behind the popularity of muds, and to some extent talkers, is the way in which communication takes place.
MUDs to the greater extent take off where BBSs ended. Typically, users of BBS systems were geographically located in the same area. I met several people from different BBSes over a period of a couple of years. MUDs simulate this 'closeness' through a 'virtual physical world' (yay, a paradox!) where the inhabitant is drawn into the online 'reality' to interact in any number of ways with the environment and other inhabitants. If you allow yourself to bridge the imagination gap then to be part of this type of online community can be quite rewarding.
I've made a lot of friends on Fractal Edge over the last three years and travelled to the US (i'm from australia) earlier this year and met a dozen of them.
...and don't be forgetting the Australians. There's a space base way up north that does various launches. I do not believe it has sent people up as yet, but in any case we've contributed Australian astronauts to the American space program in addition to our other contributions.
Give your servers a bit of an international feel, next time they get some high powered boxen give them Aussie beer names. Only the beast machines mind you, Aussie beer is the good stuff ;)
Hahn, Carlton, Boags and Tooheys are a good start. If you have a 386 out the back somewhere name it Fosters. (we don't drink this shit, why do you think we send it to you lot?).
I have two machines at home, DeiMoS and PHoBoS, the names of Mars' two moons. I did this some time ago and have since had a few other machines come and go while these have stayed. Saturn and Jupiter have gone to work and Pluto is currently deceased awaiting resurrection.
I like the idea of using JRR Tolkien's characters as machine names. Gandalf the grey, the wise wizard, is clearly cut out to be a DNS, Bilbo, the homely one, is a great web server. Troll is the firewall, and I'm sure i could pick out a good dwarf name for the radius server...
Alexander.I started using BladeEnc on windows and when I went full time to linux tried out a couple of encoders before going back to BladeEnc. It has consistently shown itself to be of exceptional speed and quality.
Recently I ripped my modest collection of 25 albums over a period of a few days using ripit, a perl script which does a cddb lookup of the tracks, rips them, and then encodes them with bladeenc or lame.
I wouldn't consider ripping a cd collection without cddb these days, after doing it the easy way it would be far too painful to do it manually.
tasty.
I am not sure that this applies equally well in this situation. Have a look at it this way. As things are there are two major providers of instant messaging software/service - AOL with its AIM client, and Mirabilis with its ICQ client. These are both proprietary systems developed closed source and have individually built up a huge user base. Various open source clients for both the ICQ and AIM services have appeared over time, (such as micq, licq, gtkicq, gaim, etc) which have all offered many of the features of the standard versions. The problem with the idea of open source servers is that Mirabilis and AOL would be openly supporting the fragmentation of their hard won user bases. As things are they are not even offering binaries of their server software, and I imagine they are not going to change this in the near future. Making the server side software source (say that ten times real fast!) open would likely result in a large number of additional IM services arising, which is not necessarily a bad thing in and of itself. It would essentially be like irc, with the ICQ/AIM user selecting a server to log onto when they launch the client, which they must have registered with in advance. The obvious downside of this, from a user point of view, is that you may have a number of friends scattered across different servers, who may in turn be stuck using their owns servers because of what their friends have been using. Open source can have good and bad consequences, in this case I am not sure that it is the way to go as the usefulness of ICQ/AIM services depends on them being used by everyone.
The media has always been about supplying what the public wants to view, and this is something that is continued to this day. Many people I have talked to recently regarding the plane crash have taken the viewpoint that the media should show some modicum of responsibility for the content that it provides the public, rather than sensationalising that which they know will draw public attention.
A lot of people complain about the crap that is aired on the media and the lack of substantial content that is immediately relevant to our own lives, but do we really want the media telling us what is relevant to us? I am happy with things the way they are, I see nothing but fluff in the daily news each night, crowd drawing spectaculars of fire and noise and death, but I am happy feeling that this is not important to me, that instead of attempting to tell me what I should know, they are showing what they think people will watch. We are in the James Cameron era, where wonderful light and sound and camera angles emotional traps are commonplace and are the magic which the media uses to draw its crowds.
The media is the new cinema - watch it, listen to what it says, but don't allow them to tell you what is important.
Having the extra competition is going to be a great thing for Australians, who up until now have had little competition in the local call market, and not a great deal more in long distance. About the only thing that has seriously challenged the (few) telcos in Australia is various online service providers introducing Voice Over IP communications, such as OzEmail Phone, which I often use myself.
My concern is that Telstra's provision of services to third parties to resell will result in a great degradation of service for those wishing to use phone lines for data services.
At present Telstra's PSTN network in certain suburban and country areas uses compression of voice channels when in peak usage periods in order to avoid rolling out new equipment to increase the base capacity. eg. if each street block has a 2Mbps pipe to the Telstra network, two blocks may have only 3Mbps between them, One each and one shared between them. In peak periods when this overlap is required by both blocks the Big Box on the corner starts chopping off bits and pieces to fit it all through. While this doesn't seriously degrade a voice call this is guaranteed to destroy any attempt a modem will have to communicate with the outside world.
If Telstra starts selling of its already obviously limited bandwidth, where then is the consumer left who wishes to get online? This is obviously something that must be done in order to open up the market, but in the interim how much will Joe Net-User suffer?
I reckon that the internet should be treated as an international entity and that if this is accepted as being the case then NSI can't really be taken to the US courts since, as has been pointed out, the US can't rule over international dealings.
Beyond this though i feel that NSI is looking at this thing the wrong way. It appears that selectively doling out domain names is NSI's way of telling us that to be given anything from them is a blessing. As NSI essentially has complete control over domain names they have an obligation to the internet as a whole not to judge, but merely to serve.
Another reader posted a link to the George Carlin 7 deadly words transcript which points out, in its fashion, that many words are not dirty unless taken in context. NSI may take it upon itself to disallow registration of domains with "indecent" language but if the courts find that they are allowed to filter out certain words, what is to stop them from selectively banning registration and registration renewal of phrases that they may consider to be indecent?
A friend of mine owns Jesus-Sucks-Dick.com which, if NSI continues on its current path, is almost certain to die off when it comes up for renewal.
Going a step further, though i doubt this will happen, what is to stop NSI from denying registration renewal to those sites which have objectionable content. I sincerely doubt that this will happen, but then it is only one more leap in logic
Not a monopoly for much longer. MCI Worldcom is buying out OzEmail and will be implementing its own infrastructure including everything from local phone lines to cross ocean wide bandwidth links. Don't forget Optus, Connect and OzEmail also have overseas links of their own at this time and Optus also offers local calls in many areas.
Aaah, I love the smell of deregulation in the morning. It smells like... purgatory.
If you read my comment again you will see that I suggested that LT might be able to build working winmodems with Ascend's technology. Hell, they could probably build better winmodems with Pizza Hut's technology...
Hey maybe with LT getting some new tech they will be able to build their el cheapo winmodems with actual functionality! From the troubles I have providing tech support for winmodems I certainly hope so. I'm not the only one. winmodems.org