France Telecom has this offering, "Netissimo", which is real crap. They had to open it up to other ISP thanks to the telecom utilities agency (ART). Initially, that is, during the beta test phase (which lasted something like 3 years!), when they were the only ISP (Wanadoo), they were using DHCP, which gave great performance and great pings (resp. close to 500kbps and less than 40 ms regularly).
Now, to accomodate with opening up their infrastructure, they have come up with a complex system involving PPTP instead of DHCP, and multiplexing ISP connectivity through a complex and already saturated ATM backbone.
On top of that, they have come up with a stupid limitation for ISPs whereby they are only allowing them to buy a limited bandwidth per customer -- this limit was initially as low as 6kBITs/s! Such a low limit comes from their broken market analysis. They had done their beta test by giving away connections to random people. However, the distribution of users amongst those who actually want to spend the money is actually quite different -- most casual surfers that were included in the initial test period did'nt want to pay, whereas telecommuters and hardcore gamers, who hit hard on the bandwidth esp. during peak period, being now a fair share of their clientele!
So they've raised the limit, but still to an uselessly low level.
Initially, for your amazement, I got a whopping 30kBITs/s max transfer rate and 1000ms minimum ping! Yeah, they have no clue how to configure their convoluted network. Apparently, they don't even know what causes such a high lag. And no, it's nothing to do with the actual ADSL technology: theoretically, you can get bad lag from ADSL at higher rates (4+ Mbps) if your line has too much noise (like when you're far away from the central). However, I'm a few hundred meters away from it, the line quality has been found good, etc... and amongst users just about everybody experiences bad lags regularly, if not constantly.
Now we've started a user group to try to lobby France Telecom -- but it's hard to get a big corporation to actually give out any information (as opposed to smaller ISPs giving realtime info on their network for instance).
I pay something like $65 (450FF) for 512/128 kbps. Things have improved lately and I get about 400kbps and 100ms pings out of it.
... not as hard as crackin RC-64, but hard nevertheless. Think about it -- why are those transmitted through human voice? If the recipient always had powerful and up to date computing equipment, it'd be much better to have it transmitted manually. Then the bandwidth of such stuff is very bad. Sooo... to begin with we might have to think of the uses of the stuff.
Then... even though they're emitting constantly, they might not actually be transmitting info all the time. So much of the stuff will be complete garbage...
Money, money, money... so it's all just about money. Hell I guess that by your standards Bill Gates should have more moral stature than any Nobel Prize around. That just does'nt make sense.
I used to be pro GM until I realized that most of the purposes they were put to use were just plain stupid. They make mainly herbicide resisting cereals for instance. Great: so you just kill everything else and pollute some more. Great TWO: it's been proven without a doubt that those genes are likely to spread to other vegetal species, rendering the specific herbicide useless, thus leading to use alternative herbicides which are likely to be even less environmentally friendly.
Face it: you've been brainwashed by the politically correct movement. It's ok to make fun of stupid lusers in their back. Being stupid is a good reason to be laughed off. I've been laughed at for saying something stupid -- hell, I've dealt with it, I'm not a child.
Now, it's not ok to make fun of a handicapped person for instance. They can't do anything about it. Can you see the difference?
What if those "consumers" actually considered themselves as citizens, and, for example, got a law passed by the means of a referendum? Say, 60% of the citizens of a country vote "yes" to ban GM foods from their countries. Does this hold less than if they "boycott" products? Does this mean that only the rich, who are able to actually choose what they buy, as opposed to just merely buying what they can, have a say?
And more indirectly, what if instead of a poll on this issue, the parties supporting GM food get wiped out of office at the next elections, and the anti-GM food get massive support from the voters, is it still eeeevil politicians manipulation?
Does anyone know what's the "embargo" the IBM researcher is mentioning in the wired article???
New BIBLE patent applied for at USPTO!
on
At The Crossroads
·
· Score: 3
An apparatus for trolling by extracting randomly selected quotes from the bible. An apparatus comprising a computer system and a computer program determining a semi-random number.
An apparatus for generating human sounding text. The device consist of a computer network of apparati comprising a keyboard linked to a Central Processing Unit and an Input Processor.
The Input Processor comprises a mammal device referred to as Main Operating Network Knowledgeable Expert Yoddler (M.O.N.K.E.Y.) which automatically types semi-randomized character sequences, as described in US PATENT #69666.
An apparatus for connecting to "community" bulletin board system ("The Website") through the means of the Inter-Net system.
When you look at the details of the trial issues, at the end of the article, it makes a lot of sense.
Beyond that, the article raises a lot of intersting AND frightening point. What if an offender has the same name as *you*? Shit, I know there was another guy with the same name AND same age as I in my university, although I never met him -- I discovered that when I applied for a library card: "oh you are already registered". Not me!
Even more crazy, when I was 10 or something, I was living in an appartment, and in the same building there was two married women of the same age and same names!
So this is quite a common situation. Now what happens if one those people is convicted? The legal system sometimes fucks up. But... if it's a sex-related offense (rape?), it's not even a problem with the legal system, but also with well-thinking vigilante...
Yes, 'cause lusers that they are, if they tried to shoot me, they'd hit their own foot. I'd have plenty of time to draw my own and defend myself.
I like naïveté when I see it, and I have to tell you: what I'm worried about, is that my neighbour starts shooting a burglar... and well it's not really a burglar but just his neighbour (me) coming back home late at night.
Yeah, and on top of that superpimp.org got $8.37 in 29th round of funding. With all that money, and with the help of Andover.net's lawyers, they'll be able to crush the RIAA, MPAA and Microsoft altogether!
This is true. Superpimp.org is being sued by the RIAA! They can't afford their own legal defense since their first round of financing only yielded $8.36. Support superpimp.org!
Clerk: How big is your television? Me: I don't have a TV.
They *deserved* to go bankrupt
on
Boo No More
·
· Score: 2
I've *never* seen such a good example of a badly designed web site. It goes against *any* common sense, let alone advanced user interface guidelines. I went there the first day of their opening, and I found it:
comletely unusable
took hours to load
full of stupid glitches
full of crappy flash animations
required tons of plugins
HAD A NON RESIZEABLE WINDOW (arrgg!!)
full of useless products anyway
*expensive* prices!
without any kind of added value
Overall, most of the junk mail I get in my snailmailbox is more useful than this crap site ever was.
The downside is that plenty of legitimate ideas won't get financed as a result of investor getting too cautious now. For fuck's sake, it was so fucking obvious that those people did'nt have the slightest clue what they were doing!
GO TO HELL, BOO.COM, AND STAY THERE!!!
Bank of America is *FUCKING* DUMB and here's why
on
Dialectizer Shut Down
·
· Score: 5
So they're going to pay Lawyers $$$$, threaten freedom of speech, and look like complete idiots whereas they could have achieved what they wanted by just adding this line to httpd.conf:
Deny from rinkworks.com
Fucking clueless corporate bullies. Too bad stupidity is not lethal.
Which point are you trying to make here? "We" tried to stop Hitler. Too late. We lost. Don't forget that hundreds of thousands of French soldiers died during the blitzkrieg. A real slaughter. You make it sound like "we" (I put quotes bc I was'nt born and don't want to sound like I'm taking credit for it) did'nt try to as if we were to weak to do it. Well, don't forget that Hitler defeated both the French AND English army in 1940. Shit happens. Tough luck. At least "we" tried.
For example, France won't extradite an US citizen if he risks death penalty, as there is no death penalty here.
A bit strange and fucked up: a rapist+murderer is sought by the french police, he ran for shelter in Portugal, which might *not* extradite him because he risks over 30 years in France, whereas 30 years is the maximum in Portugal. Had he risked less, he would have been extradited already...
I've looked at various commodity color case offerings, and they all looked cheap and not very well designed. Sure, they're funny looking, but they don't have the impressive high-end, quality aspect that SGIs, Macs or even Sun boxen have. They really look like cheap.tw plastic. (No offense to *.tw... but you see what I mean)
So why, tell me, WHY did you use PIXELS (px) instead of POINTS (pt), thereby overriding my painfully crafted DPI settings, rendering your all page unviewable on my Linux machine?
I have bad news for you... people die all the time! And yeah, I find this somewhat comic... comic in a sad way. Maybe that's just my sarcastic nature. I find it comic that they had all those grandiose ideas, and the result is such a disaster. Call me cynical.
Slashdot Mirror
You forgot xnot.com. Same as sourceforge in most respects. AFAIK. IANAL. HTH. YMMV.
France Telecom has this offering, "Netissimo", which is real crap. They had to open it up to other ISP thanks to the telecom utilities agency (ART). Initially, that is, during the beta test phase (which lasted something like 3 years!), when they were the only ISP (Wanadoo), they were using DHCP, which gave great performance and great pings (resp. close to 500kbps and less than 40 ms regularly).
Now, to accomodate with opening up their infrastructure, they have come up with a complex system involving PPTP instead of DHCP, and multiplexing ISP connectivity through a complex and already saturated ATM backbone.
On top of that, they have come up with a stupid limitation for ISPs whereby they are only allowing them to buy a limited bandwidth per customer -- this limit was initially as low as 6kBITs/s! Such a low limit comes from their broken market analysis. They had done their beta test by giving away connections to random people. However, the distribution of users amongst those who actually want to spend the money is actually quite different -- most casual surfers that were included in the initial test period did'nt want to pay, whereas telecommuters and hardcore gamers, who hit hard on the bandwidth esp. during peak period, being now a fair share of their clientele!
So they've raised the limit, but still to an uselessly low level.
Initially, for your amazement, I got a whopping 30kBITs/s max transfer rate and 1000ms minimum ping! Yeah, they have no clue how to configure their convoluted network. Apparently, they don't even know what causes such a high lag. And no, it's nothing to do with the actual ADSL technology: theoretically, you can get bad lag from ADSL at higher rates (4+ Mbps) if your line has too much noise (like when you're far away from the central). However, I'm a few hundred meters away from it, the line quality has been found good, etc ... and amongst users just about everybody experiences bad lags regularly, if not constantly.
Now we've started a user group to try to lobby France Telecom -- but it's hard to get a big corporation to actually give out any information (as opposed to smaller ISPs giving realtime info on their network for instance).
I pay something like $65 (450FF) for 512/128 kbps. Things have improved lately and I get about 400kbps and 100ms pings out of it.
... not as hard as crackin RC-64, but hard nevertheless. Think about it -- why are those transmitted through human voice? If the recipient always had powerful and up to date computing equipment, it'd be much better to have it transmitted manually. Then the bandwidth of such stuff is very bad. Sooo ... to begin with we might have to think of the uses of the stuff.
Then ... even though they're emitting constantly, they might not actually be transmitting info all the time. So much of the stuff will be complete garbage ...
Money, money, money ... so it's all just about money. Hell I guess that by your standards Bill Gates should have more moral stature than any Nobel Prize around. That just does'nt make sense.
I used to be pro GM until I realized that most of the purposes they were put to use were just plain stupid. They make mainly herbicide resisting cereals for instance. Great: so you just kill everything else and pollute some more. Great TWO: it's been proven without a doubt that those genes are likely to spread to other vegetal species, rendering the specific herbicide useless, thus leading to use alternative herbicides which are likely to be even less environmentally friendly.
Face it: you've been brainwashed by the politically correct movement. It's ok to make fun of stupid lusers in their back. Being stupid is a good reason to be laughed off. I've been laughed at for saying something stupid -- hell, I've dealt with it, I'm not a child.
Now, it's not ok to make fun of a handicapped person for instance. They can't do anything about it. Can you see the difference?
What if those "consumers" actually considered themselves as citizens, and, for example, got a law passed by the means of a referendum? Say, 60% of the citizens of a country vote "yes" to ban GM foods from their countries. Does this hold less than if they "boycott" products? Does this mean that only the rich, who are able to actually choose what they buy, as opposed to just merely buying what they can, have a say?
And more indirectly, what if instead of a poll on this issue, the parties supporting GM food get wiped out of office at the next elections, and the anti-GM food get massive support from the voters, is it still eeeevil politicians manipulation?
Yes, you see, I'm for democracy, not moneycracy.
Does anyone know what's the "embargo" the IBM researcher is mentioning in the wired article???
When you look at the details of the trial issues, at the end of the article, it makes a lot of sense.
Beyond that, the article raises a lot of intersting AND frightening point. What if an offender has the same name as *you*? Shit, I know there was another guy with the same name AND same age as I in my university, although I never met him -- I discovered that when I applied for a library card: "oh you are already registered". Not me!
Even more crazy, when I was 10 or something, I was living in an appartment, and in the same building there was two married women of the same age and same names!
So this is quite a common situation. Now what happens if one those people is convicted? The legal system sometimes fucks up. But ... if it's a sex-related offense (rape?), it's not even a problem with the legal system, but also with well-thinking vigilante ...
It would be informative to remember that this party is severely punished every time they make anything close to a racist statement.
Yes, 'cause lusers that they are, if they tried to shoot me, they'd hit their own foot. I'd have plenty of time to draw my own and defend myself.
I like naïveté when I see it, and I have to tell you: what I'm worried about, is that my neighbour starts shooting a burglar ... and well it's not really a burglar but just his neighbour (me) coming back home late at night.
Yeah, and on top of that superpimp.org got $8.37 in 29th round of funding. With all that money, and with the help of Andover.net's lawyers, they'll be able to crush the RIAA, MPAA and Microsoft altogether!
This is true. Superpimp.org is being sued by the RIAA! They can't afford their own legal defense since their first round of financing only yielded $8.36. Support superpimp.org!
Clerk: How big is your television? Me: I don't have a TV.
I've *never* seen such a good example of a badly designed web site. It goes against *any* common sense, let alone advanced user interface guidelines. I went there the first day of their opening, and I found it:
Overall, most of the junk mail I get in my snailmailbox is more useful than this crap site ever was.
The downside is that plenty of legitimate ideas won't get financed as a result of investor getting too cautious now. For fuck's sake, it was so fucking obvious that those people did'nt have the slightest clue what they were doing!
GO TO HELL, BOO.COM, AND STAY THERE!!!
So they're going to pay Lawyers $$$$, threaten freedom of speech, and look like complete idiots whereas they could have achieved what they wanted by just adding this line to httpd.conf:
Deny from rinkworks.com
Fucking clueless corporate bullies. Too bad stupidity is not lethal.
Which point are you trying to make here? "We" tried to stop Hitler. Too late. We lost. Don't forget that hundreds of thousands of French soldiers died during the blitzkrieg. A real slaughter. You make it sound like "we" (I put quotes bc I was'nt born and don't want to sound like I'm taking credit for it) did'nt try to as if we were to weak to do it. Well, don't forget that Hitler defeated both the French AND English army in 1940. Shit happens. Tough luck. At least "we" tried.
For example, France won't extradite an US citizen if he risks death penalty, as there is no death penalty here.
A bit strange and fucked up: a rapist+murderer is sought by the french police, he ran for shelter in Portugal, which might *not* extradite him because he risks over 30 years in France, whereas 30 years is the maximum in Portugal. Had he risked less, he would have been extradited already ...
You forgot:
Well my point is that Wine is an emulator, so we agree ;) my post was truncated for some reason, that's why it didn't make much sense.
Very well put. Thank you for writing this.
I've looked at various commodity color case offerings, and they all looked cheap and not very well designed. Sure, they're funny looking, but they don't have the impressive high-end, quality aspect that SGIs, Macs or even Sun boxen have. They really look like cheap .tw plastic. (No offense to *.tw ... but you see what I mean)
I quote from your website:
So why, tell me, WHY did you use PIXELS (px) instead of POINTS (pt), thereby overriding my painfully crafted DPI settings, rendering your all page unviewable on my Linux machine?
I have bad news for you ... people die all the time! And yeah, I find this somewhat comic ... comic in a sad way. Maybe that's just my sarcastic nature. I find it comic that they had all those grandiose ideas, and the result is such a disaster. Call me cynical.