Ahh, but £0.02 would be more useful. I have 0,02 lying around somewhere that I can probably do without for a little while..
..just trying out my new key mappings actually, I got fed up typing alt-156 and alt-0128 for currency symbols when I'm using Windows (but not so fed up I'd go back to qwerty). [the dll-based keymaps that win2k uses really do suck for non-USian Dvorak users without a program like that].
Anyway, unless we get a government that has a fscking clue (which going on the last 30-odd years seems pretty unlikely to happen here), I don't think we'd really be all that much worse off by joining, and there are some advantages that would make life a lot less hassle for some people.
Anyway, dragging it back nearly on-topic, I wonder if the ban will extend to cybernetic organisms too. Let's see if we can start it while he's out of the country:)
When blocking mobile phone signals they are usually just transmitting a signal on the same frequency at a higher amplitude than the phone.
You usually need a license to do that, which wouldn't normally be granted. (Ok, maybe you don't need one for a closed loop system).
But you don't need a license to enclose something in a Faraday cage (just more money, both in terms of installation costs, and running costs in the form of increased fuel use).
With appropriate technical standards, UWB devices can operate using spectrum occupied by existing radio services without causing interference - at least in theory.
That depends whether your definition of 'interference' is that it stops something from working, or whether it's that it interferes with it in some way (maybe by raising the noise floor enough that Tx power has to be increased to overcome it).
UWB at the moment seems like it may be more of a way of exploiting patents before they expire, than providing something which is really necessary. There's plenty of ways to fit more into existing spectrum by being smarter (e.g. moving some analogue broadcasts over to digital modulations, use of time-division between operators, and maybe computer-controlled dynamic spectrum allocation) before some technology which works by interfering with *everything* (just to a smaller degree) to squeeze more in is required.
Well that's my 0,02 anyway...(bah, *Britan*, indeed). And I wonder, does laptop use at airports get banned too? And who, carrying a laptop, would want to allow it as hold baggage (if they're allowed in the cabin, you *will* get some idiots try to use them...)
Also: If you buy Opera, you get Mulberry half price. If you buy Mulberry, you get Opera half price. If you want both, make sure you buy them in the right order.
Surge supressors are usually more useful for the guarantee some of them come with than anything else. Lightning conductors to excellent grounds (e.g. a buried length of copper pipe attached to chunky wire) are the way to go, though even they won't help all that much for phone lines.
The Soekris boxes might be good. They're Elan-based (486) single-board computers (not PC/104). They come with 8-bit general purpose I/O, compactflash, RS232, PCI, miniPCI, ethernet, hardware watchdog, and some have PC card support. Console is directed over the RS232 port. Take a look at the mailing list archives for examples of what people are doing with them.
Not directly relevant to learning a Linux based system, but maybe an interesting training tool: old home computers! Some of the Commodore computers (for example C64, VIC20, Plus4) have general-purpose I/O 'user ports'.
Using the free code from the Info-Zip group to handle the compression, no less. Still, it's been kind-of traditional to base things on other code in the world of compression.
They've got a big long list of ISP numbers (and some company networks with dial-in access, which at one point you used to be able to list on-line, greatly assisting in wardialling efferts, but that's another story...) which they use to bar internet calls from the specials (and is also used to stop you using them on the flat-rate deals on voice calls).
It's fine to use them in in F+F and BF though. They can be set up online too.
The article you link to doesn't have any current figures, what it does say is that 40% of UK households were connected to exchanges which were enabled in September 2000. (Although it doesn't say how many of those households are within the distance limit).
619 exchanges out of 5500 or so is a little over 10%. Gotta be careful with these statistics, they're slippery things...
Other interesting points about BT: The exchanges enabled back then were in an earlier stage where BT weren't so choosy about which ones they enabled. Nowadays you need rather higher demand in an area to have an exchange enabled than was required back then, unless it's in an area where BT managed to wangle some European funding under their 'rent a Compaq machine at a cheap rate for 18 months of a 3 year contract and get a rebate on part of the costs of a 20:1 contention [i.e. more expensive] line which brings it down to only a little above the cost of a 50:1 line'.
A couple of points I noticed when setting up networks for people in Cornwall who took up that offer and decided they needed a bit of help - if you already have a domain name that you don't want to move, you'll want to make sure you get static IP addresses so you can run mail server software to send your mail outwards with your own domain name on it without the DUL getting in the way (BT's mail servers restrict the sender addresses which can be used). Of course that also means you'll need some kind of firewall, NAT or proxy server to provide internet access for Windows machines on your LAN (unless you want to use personal firewall software, funnily enough available from BT at extra cost).
Also, you'd better make sure you order the right service because they'll charge £150 and make you wait a couple of weeks if you want to change between NAT and no-NAT.
so dialup access is either through an ISP that offers a toll free number (AOL, Compuserve etc) which are expensive
Bit more than AOL/Compuserve - almost all UK ISPs offer it... I don't think they're really all that expensive, around £15/month isn't excessive, though it does mean there's not much premium for an ADSL connection. (Of course if you're one of those strange people that uses the phone line for voice calls too, ADSL *is* cheaper than a second line + ISP charges).
or an ISP that offers free use, but with a normal local call rate number, costing you 2p per minute off peak, and 3.5p per minute on peak.
With BT it's 3.16p daytime, 1.2p evenings, 0.8p weekends (providing you remember to list the isp for 'best friend' discount, otherwise 20% more)... so it's cheaper to use BT at weekends than use the 1p/min 24x7 services (e.g. onetel and eurobell).
And of course for low users (or heavy users who can do most things offline, which works pretty well for people spending a lot of time on newsgroups and mailing lists), it's cheaper to just pay per-minute with no monthly charge.
UK is still down below the US in 'percent of internet users on broadband', unlike many other places in Europe (which still often do have to pay charges).
Actually, I suspect it's more of a case that dial-up is an entrenched market in the US whereas it wasn't in either Japan or Korea.
Pay-per-minute dialup really sucks. Had it in Europe too (still do in many countries). Especially when the ISP takes a cut of that penny-per-minute, which gives them incentive to provide as crappy a service as they can without annoying you so much you'll move your account elsewhere...
Also keep in mind that since the main language spoken is Japanese, the international bandwidth use is a lot lower than it would be where English is more widely used, and the national bandwidth doesn't have to cover such a large area.
(Australia has the worst of both worlds there - quite a lot of international traffic *and* a large country - at least in the USA the size of the country is balanced by the fact that most of the rest of the world pays the bill for international bandwidth, inbound *and* outbound).
I agree that changing colours helps a lot. Laptops are good too (but can have other problems - like on mine I can't swap the keycaps to Dvorak layout, which I don't know well enough to not need to look occasionally, but do know well enough to never want to touch qwerty again:-)
I've been using #453dad background and #9191d6 menus, white text, with the monitor brightness turned way down.
I find these colours work a bit better than white-on-black (since black monitors also show quite a lot of reflections) and much better than black-on-white... The other day I realised how similar they are to the Commodore 64 standard colours, quite interesting since I think they were likely to have been chosen to work under not-quite-ideal viewing conditions.
Works great on a lot of things, but websites can be difficult - certain colour text.gifs with a transparent background are a particular problem - and I also had trouble with a lot of websites that set bgcolor but not text, link and vlink... Opera is a big help, just modify the user stylesheet and you're only a ^G away from a readable page if something really doesn't work.
White backgrounds are pretty horrible looking if you get used to something else, *and* they waste electricity on CRTs:-) Maybe they wouldn't need so much lead in the tubes to block electrons if standard desktops had darker backgrounds too. Maybe it's all a plot by space aliens to cause us to be exposed to radiation so we mutate quicker... Yeah, space aliens, that must be it.
Also, ATRAC can use a greater resolution for sections where the music demands it (up to 20 bits on most recorders, 24 bits on ATRAC 4.5), whereas redbook CD is fixed at 16 bits. (Obviously this is only useful where you have source material with better resolution than CD).
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Anyway, unless we get a government that has a fscking clue (which going on the last 30-odd years seems pretty unlikely to happen here), I don't think we'd really be all that much worse off by joining, and there are some advantages that would make life a lot less hassle for some people.
Anyway, dragging it back nearly on-topic, I wonder if the ban will extend to cybernetic organisms too. Let's see if we can start it while he's out of the country :)
But you don't need a license to enclose something in a Faraday cage (just more money, both in terms of installation costs, and running costs in the form of increased fuel use).
UWB at the moment seems like it may be more of a way of exploiting patents before they expire, than providing something which is really necessary. There's plenty of ways to fit more into existing spectrum by being smarter (e.g. moving some analogue broadcasts over to digital modulations, use of time-division between operators, and maybe computer-controlled dynamic spectrum allocation) before some technology which works by interfering with *everything* (just to a smaller degree) to squeeze more in is required.
Well that's my 0,02 anyway...(bah, *Britan*, indeed). And I wonder, does laptop use at airports get banned too? And who, carrying a laptop, would want to allow it as hold baggage (if they're allowed in the cabin, you *will* get some idiots try to use them...)
Most people don't look at that tag, just the "MSIE 5.0" bit.
Also: If you buy Opera, you get Mulberry half price. If you buy Mulberry, you get Opera half price.
If you want both, make sure you buy them in the right order.
Ctrl-Tab is documented in the 'window control' section of the keyboard help for Opera (^B).
Surge supressors are usually more useful for the guarantee some of them come with than anything else. Lightning conductors to excellent grounds (e.g. a buried length of copper pipe attached to chunky wire) are the way to go, though even they won't help all that much for phone lines.
They're good in some types of non-open-source company, too.
Not directly relevant to learning a Linux based system, but maybe an interesting training tool: old home computers! Some of the Commodore computers (for example C64, VIC20, Plus4) have general-purpose I/O 'user ports'.
I don't have personal experience of these but they look fairly nice too and maybe a little cheaper than the Aironet.
You won't be able to talk about doing it under the forthcoming UK legislation...
It's fine to use them in in F+F and BF though. They can be set up online too.
Seems more similar to this to me (:
CompactBSD uses the BSD license with the advertising clause which I understand is not GPL compatible..?
619 exchanges out of 5500 or so is a little over 10%. Gotta be careful with these statistics, they're slippery things...
Other interesting points about BT: The exchanges enabled back then were in an earlier stage where BT weren't so choosy about which ones they enabled. Nowadays you need rather higher demand in an area to have an exchange enabled than was required back then, unless it's in an area where BT managed to wangle some European funding under their 'rent a Compaq machine at a cheap rate for 18 months of a 3 year contract and get a rebate on part of the costs of a 20:1 contention [i.e. more expensive] line which brings it down to only a little above the cost of a 50:1 line'.
A couple of points I noticed when setting up networks for people in Cornwall who took up that offer and decided they needed a bit of help - if you already have a domain name that you don't want to move, you'll want to make sure you get static IP addresses so you can run mail server software to send your mail outwards with your own domain name on it without the DUL getting in the way (BT's mail servers restrict the sender addresses which can be used). Of course that also means you'll need some kind of firewall, NAT or proxy server to provide internet access for Windows machines on your LAN (unless you want to use personal firewall software, funnily enough available from BT at extra cost).
Also, you'd better make sure you order the right service because they'll charge £150 and make you wait a couple of weeks if you want to change between NAT and no-NAT.
Bit more than AOL/Compuserve - almost all UK ISPs offer it... I don't think they're really all that expensive, around £15/month isn't excessive, though it does mean there's not much premium for an ADSL connection. (Of course if you're one of those strange people that uses the phone line for voice calls too, ADSL *is* cheaper than a second line + ISP charges).With BT it's 3.16p daytime, 1.2p evenings, 0.8p weekends (providing you remember to list the isp for 'best friend' discount, otherwise 20% more)And of course for low users (or heavy users who can do most things offline, which works pretty well for people spending a lot of time on newsgroups and mailing lists), it's cheaper to just pay per-minute with no monthly charge.
UK is still down below the US in 'percent of internet users on broadband', unlike many other places in Europe (which still often do have to pay charges).
(Australia has the worst of both worlds there - quite a lot of international traffic *and* a large country - at least in the USA the size of the country is balanced by the fact that most of the rest of the world pays the bill for international bandwidth, inbound *and* outbound).
I've been using #453dad background and #9191d6 menus, white text, with the monitor brightness turned way down. I find these colours work a bit better than white-on-black (since black monitors also show quite a lot of reflections) and much better than black-on-white... The other day I realised how similar they are to the Commodore 64 standard colours, quite interesting since I think they were likely to have been chosen to work under not-quite-ideal viewing conditions.
Works great on a lot of things, but websites can be difficult - certain colour text .gifs with a transparent background are a particular problem - and I also had trouble with a lot of websites that set bgcolor but not text, link and vlink... Opera is a big help, just modify the user stylesheet and you're only a ^G away from a readable page if something really doesn't work.
White backgrounds are pretty horrible looking if you get used to something else, *and* they waste electricity on CRTs :-) Maybe they wouldn't need so much lead in the tubes to block electrons if standard desktops had darker backgrounds too. Maybe it's all a plot by space aliens to cause us to be exposed to radiation so we mutate quicker... Yeah, space aliens, that must be it.
Some more info here.
First Citylink, now this, it seems that New Zealand totally rocks...
('they' being Starbucks or more specifically the provider of their service which is now T-Mobile)