I work for RR and I'd like to know how it's going to affect us too...;)
Seriously though, the fcc is mandating that RR open up the pipes for other ISP's to offer cable modem service. First on the list, Earthlink. 15 seconds (yes, it's in the court order, 15 seconds) after Earthlink gets their 1st cable modem subscriber, AOL is allowed to start offering their service via cable modem.
Pain in the ass for us because we've had to do a whole lot of work on the back-end systems and provisioning stuff so that they can be provisioned according to which ISP they're subscribing.
This stuff with AT&T is a little confusing because after AT&T bought MediaOne, they were ordered to divest of all their shares of RR, which they did. AT&T in the Boston area is still using the RR brand itself, but they actually aren't an RR affiliate any longer. They'll be discontinuing their use of the RR brand sometime soon, I'm told.
I do know that AT&T was really impressed with the way RR did business. Their @home offering is just ridiculous compared to RR. They thought they could just have this big cable modem operation by bringing in a bunch of 3rd party vendors to build the shit, drop it in place and it would just run... NOT. When they saw how RR does things, I think they realized how aweful their operation was. I even heard that @home was giving customers static ip addresses in some divisions (don't know if this is still the cast)... While that may sound attractive to end users who want to run servers, what they don't realize is that it pretty much prevents growth. When utilization in a particular area grows, you need to be able to split the area up, which requires an ip renumber. If you can't renumber because everyone has a static, pretty soon the area is going to get horribly oversold resulting in super-slow access.
So, as far as how it affects RR users, it shouldn't, really. I suspect RR is just going to be another service offering, so it will be one of your choices of ISP's, pretty much. The worst case basis is that RR simply becomes a delivery vehicle for aol... *%!$ that noise...
Brethed says he avoids race but I remember 3 strips that dealt with it directly. One involving a flesh-coloured band-aid, one involving 'flesh' crayons, and a third where the young black kid buys a copy of 'ebony', and the little white kid tries to buy a copy of the ficticious 'ivory' to which the proprieter says something like 'shoo! i run a progressive newstand here!'. Maybe not dealing with it so serious, but to a 12-year-old it seemed like advanced socialogical debate;)
Actually, your comment jogged another memory. I specifically remember a series of strips where Binkley is in school and develops his first crush and the girl was black. He comes home and he's telling his father about it and as he's going on and on his father is thinking to himself with fatherly pride "My son is in love!" About that time he finishes his description of his schoolyard sweetheart "skin of chocolate..." and his father thinks "chocolate?!"
I don't recall the outcome. I'm pretty sure it can be found in Berke's first book though.
You're forgetting the lovely Yaz Pistachio... she was more my type.;)
Seriously though, I still have my old BC books. Most are in rough shape due to many moves, but my Billy and the Boingers is still intact with the vinyl still attached and untouched.
My favorite stuff still comes from the really early strips. Who remembers Senator Befellow? Milo and the Bloom Picayune would call up his wife for comments. Those were great.
MAPS definitely has an affect for me. Just on my office mailserver (~150 accts) I did postfix log report and a little math. In one week, of 45,000 messages received and 70,000 delivered, there were almost 4300 rejected. When I broke it down, there a little over 1000 rejected by my maps_rbl_domains servers I've added. A few were rejected by my regexp file and the remaining were domains not found and that sort of thing.
Yeah, whaddya expect. You know it's some flunky running ghost or something, stuffing images on drives all day long.
One of the reasons we stick with Dell though is because of the 4-hour onsite guarantee you can purchase. Otherwise we'd just go with penguin computing since the prices are still competetive and they'll ship with a raid10 config already set up. Plus there was even a nifty little thing on the web page to allow you to customize your file system layout.
Actually, where I work, we've bought 4 Dell 2450's and 2 2550's preloaded with Linux so far. Granted, I still rebuild it from scratch... Aside from preferring to install it myself, they also won't set it up as a Raid10 from the factory.
It's probably not far off here in the US as well. I work for a cable isp and we'll actually be testing a new product for 100Mbps service by the end of the year. According to the company who developed this stuff, it's really just a matter of replacing some of the field hardware with some (relatively) inexpensive stuff that allows it to use the 1+Ghz spectrum where it will consume way more than your normal 6Mhz channel width worth of bandwidth for both up and downstream. On one hand, it's not as susceptible to noise/ingress problems the way the current return path is, but you still have to have a clean plant or a lot of amplifiers to get this new stuff to run well.
Too true. Presque Isle, Maine has cable modem service. The most rural cable modem deployment in the world, I'm told. They probably have webcams for watching potatoes grow and stuff.
Seriously though, it's been good for the economy up there. As of recently, Burrell's Transcripts offices are there now, obtaining service via one of the higher business class offerings of cable modems.
Doesn't say much for his research that he couldn't even get the keyboard layout correct. The number 6 is on the *WRONG* side of the keyboard... ala microsoft natural keyboard...
Not sure why the people griping about the content of television in this discussion are getting moderated UP. Not that I don't disagree that a large portion of today's content fits the actual definition of pulp fiction, but this is a discussion about improving technology. Do you think they criticized Henry Ford ~100 years ago saying "Why bother building a better car, there's no decent roads to drive it on?"
Besides, there's a new thing coming up quick, VOD. Sure, they're just going to stock your top ten PPV's at first, but you WILL see a day soon where if you're up at 4am and can't sleep and the mood strikes you, Enter the Dragon will be a few clicks away... Point being that HDTV isn't just for prime time television simulcasted shows...
You can see from the image that the number 6 is on the WRONG SIDE of the keyboard. Microsoft commits this grievous error on their garbage "ergonomic" keyboard, but something like this would be expected of them.
You'd think they might want to at least take a look at a typing tutor or finger chart before going through the trouble of engineering a whole device...
Another reason it's important to be able to see screenshots is because I, like many others I'm sure, often am simply seeking out a tool to do what I want that is better than the one I'm currently using. I really like most of the tools I'm using, but there's always room for that Killer App(tm).
Just take icq or even jabber, for instance. There's a number of clients out there, but do you really want to download, compile (if necessary), and install each and every single one of them?
A quick visit to the site, review the features, see the screen shot, on to the next site.
This especially isn't a surprise since Intel said this over 10 years ago...
I don't recall the exact mag, PC Week I think, circa 93-94, but there was an article reporting what Intel specifically had said years earlier. I'm pretty sure it was verbatim "In 1985, we had 4.7mhz processors, in 1995 we expect to have 150 Mhz [some word that ended up being the pentium] class processors, and in 2005 we expect to have 10 Ghz processors."
I was fairly impressed they had said that so many years prior, especially at that point in time when the p150's were almost a reality.
Safe bet that AMD is going to beat them to the punch, but that will probably only fuel Intel to beat they're own 2005 deadline.
I used to run a board locally that did pretty well. I used Searchlight BBS software. It was pretty slick because it was almost 100% customizable. It could generate some reasonably attractive menus automatically, but spending a little time in TheDraw hacking up some of Acid's legendary ansi graphics gave me some kick ass menu's. The dynamic RIP support made it really stand out, too. Gui menus without having to actually draw them.
In my prime I was even doing fidonet, too (who remembers what a "tosser" does???) and I had more door games than I can remember. TradeWars was by far the most popular and someone managed to rig up some sort of inter-bbs wars.
Tradewars ended up falling by the wayside when Ultimate Universe came out, though. It didn't really have a chance to catch on, though, that was pretty much near the end of the bbs days. IIRC, TW's map was limited to something like a 1000 cell "grid"? UU busted that limit with essentially an infinite universe and many other improvements that I forget.
I still remember the old TW strategies though. Find a dead end at least two cells deep and fortify the piss out of it!;) After a while you got to know the responses when you were doing a trade anyway, so I could usually haggle right to the exact credit.
WOW, I didn't expect to read so many "heinlein sux" posts after this review.
Obviously there are far too many people reading the spoon-fed, drivel equivalent to a Danielle Steele version of science fiction to appreciate a true artist. Not that I love each and every single book Heinlein wrote by any stretch, but for someone to simply dismiss it with a "heinlein sux" is unfortunate, at best...
Heinlein did a lot of his writing *50+* years ago. Not only did he have tremendous imagination, but think of the attitudes towards different cultures and sexuality and the like at that point in time. No pun intended, but his writing was many years ahead of its time.
Give credit where credit is due. Heinlein is one of the founding fathers of science fiction and the genre would *not* be the same without him, regardless of whether or not you like his work.
I was very sad a few weeks ago. I had to take down one of my Sun U2's because of the need to do some rack organization. It's uptime was 496 days. It performed some web caching, sendmail, and dns functions, nonstop, without a hiccup, short of upgrading sendmail and what-not.
"...they invested there life savings in a Pentium II on a fractional T1 in the university janitors closet."
:D This is so close to the truth it's scarey. I've seen where my local POP for compuserve is here. It's in this pretty run down trashy building down in this gross basement that's so dirty... well, nuff said. yick...:P
Speaking of beer, as well as a testament to sendmail's configurability, I just about fell out of my chair when I saw on the 99 bottles of beer page someone submitted an entry for sendmail!
(quick summary: this site is basically a collection of programs in EVERY programming language on earth, practically, that print out the song "99 bottles of beer on the wall", in a loop, all the way down to 0 bottles on the wall.)
That's scary, though... You're driving past a rather sightly female jogger and all of the sudden your car's doing a 180 faster than the dukes of hazzard, cuz after all, it's responding at the speed of thought....:)
Slashdot Mirror
Seriously though, the fcc is mandating that RR open up the pipes for other ISP's to offer cable modem service. First on the list, Earthlink. 15 seconds (yes, it's in the court order, 15 seconds) after Earthlink gets their 1st cable modem subscriber, AOL is allowed to start offering their service via cable modem.
Pain in the ass for us because we've had to do a whole lot of work on the back-end systems and provisioning stuff so that they can be provisioned according to which ISP they're subscribing.
This stuff with AT&T is a little confusing because after AT&T bought MediaOne, they were ordered to divest of all their shares of RR, which they did. AT&T in the Boston area is still using the RR brand itself, but they actually aren't an RR affiliate any longer. They'll be discontinuing their use of the RR brand sometime soon, I'm told.
I do know that AT&T was really impressed with the way RR did business. Their @home offering is just ridiculous compared to RR. They thought they could just have this big cable modem operation by bringing in a bunch of 3rd party vendors to build the shit, drop it in place and it would just run... NOT. When they saw how RR does things, I think they realized how aweful their operation was. I even heard that @home was giving customers static ip addresses in some divisions (don't know if this is still the cast)... While that may sound attractive to end users who want to run servers, what they don't realize is that it pretty much prevents growth. When utilization in a particular area grows, you need to be able to split the area up, which requires an ip renumber. If you can't renumber because everyone has a static, pretty soon the area is going to get horribly oversold resulting in super-slow access.
So, as far as how it affects RR users, it shouldn't, really. I suspect RR is just going to be another service offering, so it will be one of your choices of ISP's, pretty much. The worst case basis is that RR simply becomes a delivery vehicle for aol... *%!$ that noise...
I don't recall the outcome. I'm pretty sure it can be found in Berke's first book though.
Seriously though, I still have my old BC books. Most are in rough shape due to many moves, but my Billy and the Boingers is still intact with the vinyl still attached and untouched.
My favorite stuff still comes from the really early strips. Who remembers Senator Befellow? Milo and the Bloom Picayune would call up his wife for comments. Those were great.
My favorite line ever though:
"McNope, but McMaybe McLater!"
MAPS definitely has an affect for me. Just on my office mailserver (~150 accts) I did postfix log report and a little math. In one week, of 45,000 messages received and 70,000 delivered, there were almost 4300 rejected. When I broke it down, there a little over 1000 rejected by my maps_rbl_domains servers I've added. A few were rejected by my regexp file and the remaining were domains not found and that sort of thing.
One of the reasons we stick with Dell though is because of the 4-hour onsite guarantee you can purchase. Otherwise we'd just go with penguin computing since the prices are still competetive and they'll ship with a raid10 config already set up. Plus there was even a nifty little thing on the web page to allow you to customize your file system layout.
Actually, where I work, we've bought 4 Dell 2450's and 2 2550's preloaded with Linux so far. Granted, I still rebuild it from scratch... Aside from preferring to install it myself, they also won't set it up as a Raid10 from the factory.
Ontopic site worth a look.
10 Big Myths about copyright explained
Doesn't say much for his research that he couldn't even get the keyboard layout correct. The number 6 is on the *WRONG* side of the keyboard... ala microsoft natural keyboard...
Besides, there's a new thing coming up quick, VOD. Sure, they're just going to stock your top ten PPV's at first, but you WILL see a day soon where if you're up at 4am and can't sleep and the mood strikes you, Enter the Dragon will be a few clicks away... Point being that HDTV isn't just for prime time television simulcasted shows...
You'd think they might want to at least take a look at a typing tutor or finger chart before going through the trouble of engineering a whole device...
Another reason it's important to be able to see screenshots is because I, like many others I'm sure, often am simply seeking out a tool to do what I want that is better than the one I'm currently using. I really like most of the tools I'm using, but there's always room for that Killer App(tm).
Just take icq or even jabber, for instance. There's a number of clients out there, but do you really want to download, compile (if necessary), and install each and every single one of them?
A quick visit to the site, review the features, see the screen shot, on to the next site.
-- naChoZ
I don't recall the exact mag, PC Week I think, circa 93-94, but there was an article reporting what Intel specifically had said years earlier. I'm pretty sure it was verbatim "In 1985, we had 4.7mhz processors, in 1995 we expect to have 150 Mhz [some word that ended up being the pentium] class processors, and in 2005 we expect to have 10 Ghz processors."
I was fairly impressed they had said that so many years prior, especially at that point in time when the p150's were almost a reality.
Safe bet that AMD is going to beat them to the punch, but that will probably only fuel Intel to beat they're own 2005 deadline.
It's really going to suck when "PhoneNumber V6" comes out and phone numbers are suddenly 20 times longer than they used to be.... ;)
In my prime I was even doing fidonet, too (who remembers what a "tosser" does???) and I had more door games than I can remember. TradeWars was by far the most popular and someone managed to rig up some sort of inter-bbs wars.
Tradewars ended up falling by the wayside when Ultimate Universe came out, though. It didn't really have a chance to catch on, though, that was pretty much near the end of the bbs days. IIRC, TW's map was limited to something like a 1000 cell "grid"? UU busted that limit with essentially an infinite universe and many other improvements that I forget.
I still remember the old TW strategies though. Find a dead end at least two cells deep and fortify the piss out of it! ;) After a while you got to know the responses when you were doing a trade anyway, so I could usually haggle right to the exact credit.
Those were the days!
I needn't comment on the rest... roflol
Obviously there are far too many people reading the spoon-fed, drivel equivalent to a Danielle Steele version of science fiction to appreciate a true artist. Not that I love each and every single book Heinlein wrote by any stretch, but for someone to simply dismiss it with a "heinlein sux" is unfortunate, at best...
Heinlein did a lot of his writing *50+* years ago. Not only did he have tremendous imagination, but think of the attitudes towards different cultures and sexuality and the like at that point in time. No pun intended, but his writing was many years ahead of its time.
Give credit where credit is due. Heinlein is one of the founding fathers of science fiction and the genre would *not* be the same without him, regardless of whether or not you like his work.
I was very sad a few weeks ago. I had to take down one of my Sun U2's because of the need to do some rack organization. It's uptime was 496 days. It performed some web caching, sendmail, and dns functions, nonstop, without a hiccup, short of upgrading sendmail and what-not.
"...they invested there life savings in a Pentium II on a fractional T1 in the university janitors closet."
:P
:D This is so close to the truth it's scarey. I've seen where my local POP for compuserve is here. It's in this pretty run down trashy building down in this gross basement that's so dirty... well, nuff said. yick...
(quick summary: this site is basically a collection of programs in EVERY programming language on earth, practically, that print out the song "99 bottles of beer on the wall", in a loop, all the way down to 0 bottles on the wall.)
Check out sendmail's entry.
I just went to check it out. http://www.hackpcweek.com/ is already down, adding to the lameness of this contest...
That's scary, though... You're driving past a rather sightly female jogger and all of the sudden your car's doing a 180 faster than the dukes of hazzard, cuz after all, it's responding at the speed of thought.... :)