I would love it if my ATM took a fingerprint. There is one thing biometric identification has, convenience. I can't fucking forget it, like I do oh so often with my ATM card, my drivers licence, etc.
You're not a real man until your baby sized toolbox is the 8 drawer Craftsman you keep under the bathroom sink (the entire sink) just in case you need a 1/2 distributor wrench and a pair of vice-grips so you can lift your butt of the toilet after you've shorn the hold down bolts off.
Okay, so you only keep it there (and the arc welder under the stairs, and the Ford timing belt wrench you use as a doorstop, and the acetylene tanks and spare air compressor in the corner of the bedroom closet under the dirty clothes) so your wife can park her car in the garage again without denting her car (or more importantly, scratching your newly-varnished router table) when she pulls into the garage.
The Wright brothers didn't do anything new; It was a glider design gleefuly snagged from somewhere else, and someone elses motor, and you'd be betting safely if you said their props weren't their own invention. The only bit of the plane that was actually covered by a patent was the control system. It was weird, and people did different things. Modern aviation, even though spawned by the Wrights, wouldn't infringe the patent, because it was a wacky way of handling it. Sure, the Wright brothers made a pile of money, but they hampered the advance of the airplane through insane business proceedures, such as the 'Buy before we even let you see it works' trick that caused the Europeans to do things differently and the US government to laugh at them.
As for skyscrapers, they're ugly. Also, there is no IP involved in them, save simple copyright. You can't copy someone elses building word for word and beam for beam, but you better bet you can drive down to the local municipal office and see every inch of the building down to the spacing of rivets and copy every innovative idea.
And the skyscrapers weren't about money; They were a dick-size war among a few wealthy individuals and corporations.
I wouldn't even bother, because there is no such code. IBM's mainframes run multiple copies of Linux not because of modifications to Linux but because of their master virtual machine program, which runs above Linux and is the only thing really running directly on the hardware.
Linux *can* run directly on the hardware, sure, but then your only choice for running mutiple copies under it are the same choices you have when you want to run mutiple copies of that port on PCs, and all of those use the stack and run into the zero copy optimizations.
A bunch of companies make full AM/FM radios in an earbud. Had one a few years ago, cost me a whopping $14, with digital tuning and a L/R/Mono switch. Set one to right, one to left, and use one of those $40 AAA powered FM transmitters.
It's not a reference to the website. The website uses a common 'entertainment' 'industry' term. It's a reference to the end of Happy Days, when they were so desperate for ratings the shows featured things like Fonzy jumping a shark on a motorcycle.
If you have x number of real licenses, you can install them on any five machines you choose, including the donated machines. Most manufacturers haven't been dumb enough to ship their servers with anything but a real license anyway, so they're probably transferable.
Microsoft is mentally fibbing a few places to come out with their little guide. I figure this is what MS had in mind when they wrote it.
1. That all PCs have Windows on them from the factory. This isn't exactly untrue for 98% of OEM machines; Even shipped with another OS, the OEM will send you the obligational Windows95 / 98 / ME / etc CD along as well, you've already paid for it in the price of the PC, as per their agreement with Microsoft.
Had a fight with a *ahem* rep once. Ordered a bunch of workstations that were to come with NT4 Workstation, but we specified a pre-arranged software loadout. We recieved the machines with a copy of 95 in every box. Called to return it, was told we had paid for them, that they were not allowed to ship any machine to any company without a paid-for OEM version of Windows, even those that already had licenses for other operating systems, even those that had to already prove we were licensed to install NT4 Server with impunity as part of the deal to get a custom loadout on an OEM system. They had reduced the price on the machines a bit when we had specified the custom load, but not because they weren't including Windows. Because we were going to pay for a cheaper version of Windows that would never see the light of day.
So we got 100 copies of Windows 95 tied to servers that were incapable of even running it. (SMP with a known nasty APIC bug that prevented it from running.)
2. That the computer will come with an operating system on it.
This is nearly patently false. No right-minded business or individual ever donates a PC without wiping it. Also, almost no profit-minded business reinstalls Windows on the machine before resale on the used market or donation. It isn't needed to verify that the machine works, it worked fine before software wipe. It takes time and money to reinstall. The Microsoft EULA is very fuzzy when it comes to transferring a license anyway, and you're not going to eat the potential legal liability of MS going wonky because they interpret the first acceptor of the EULA to be the OEM, the transferee to be you, the limited transferability to be valid, and especially when they think they have a right to march in to seize your equipment sans warrant.
3. That any machine that comes without an OS means a lost sale of Windows to the company that didn't include it. They're calling these people pirates, because if they didn't include it with the machine, they must have it installed illegally on other machines.
Most certainly false. Usually companies hooked on Microsoft products upgrade the OS once before they donate, if the hardware upgrade wasn't the direct effect of Microsoft telling them that they weren't going to be able to buy new Windows licenses of the old version these machines were indoubtably shipped with to keep with growth and replacements. They're being donated because they're three or four year old machines by the time they're donated and no longer able to run the OS Microsoft hawks on you to buy, saying you'll lose your Select/MCAS/MCVR status and be forced to buy individual licenses for retail price if you don't buy now.
Besides, how many of you are going to pirate the old OEM copies of Win98 from the donated machines and put them on the brand new PCs you bought? You know, the ones that came with XP on them? You know, the ones you had to buy because you have to buy XP because MS won't sell you Win98 anymore nor support it?
There is no situation where you will get only 5% of your bandwidth while everyone else gets 100% of theirs if all the end points are of equal bandwidth. Both your 20 second email download and the greedy hog down the street with a 20 hour Gnutella session will get the same 'peak' bandwidth if there is a saturated bottleneck in the network. The network hog recieves more data, sure, but remember; You're not greedy, all you wanted was your email. Because of the hog(s), it took you five seconds to retreive your email instead of three.
A more correct analogy would be a one seater ride with 9 people riding constantly. You want to ride only ten times, but you think you are entitled to cut ahead of everyone to get your rides simply because they have all ridden before, and will ride again no matter if you cut in front ten times or not.
And as for your math, it's flawed. Look at the 'minimum guaranteed bandwidth' clause in your contract. Sure, everyone can have a sustained bandwidth of T1 speeds, but they are not given that. The ISP takes roughly double the guaranteed bandwidth, multiplies it by the typical number of users in peak times, and buys that much bandwidth. If they only have a 1/10 T1-speed guaranteed downstream and only a peak user base of 1/5 of their paying members they make out like bandits, to the tune of $2500 a month over bandwidth costs. At least in the dialup market, you can count far fewer users online concurrently than one out of five, so realistioally they make out like bigger bandits than my math shows.
Try the Australian mirror as well. Because of discrepancies in the way countries expire copyright, many books are listed on the Australian site that are not available on the main repository.
And before you go bagging fullscale on the US; There are many books listed on the US site that are not on the British. We're not the worst! =)
We're treating the African ISPs the same as we would treat the same sized ISP here in the states. You generate enough traffic, I'll peer with you and we'll split the bill. You don't generate enough traffic? Oh, well. You pay full rate for your bandwidth.
The gentleman was complaining that they're being gouged because the telecom companies are not giving them free money. The ITU decided to be nice and force all the telephone companies to give them a handout on telephone service, and this fellow thinks the ITU should require them to do so on data traffic as well.
My attitude is somewhere between 'Get off yer lazy ass and lay some cable, foo' and 'This guy is worse than the Pontiac street-people that think merely because they exists, the world, and myself by extention, owe him $5 so they can go buy crack or a bottle of Thunderbird.'
Bah. I have a Radio Shack Pocket Computer, now that would make a great webserver. Quasi-serial port built on to it, a cassette interface, and a 250hz processor.
It's already been done to the PC2 (Pocket Computer 2), which had a *real* serial port attachment available for it. That sucker, however, is about five times as powerful as the PC(1).
Re:Military threats promote innovation
on
Space Wars
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
Barbed wire is a much older invention. Try 1860.
The important parts to World War I were aerial recon, machine guns, and long-range artillery. Oh, and poison gas. And the end of the grand march across Europe, as was done as late as 1880. It gave us real trench warfare too. Of course, it also gave us the laughed at Zeppelins and bombers that were nothing more than a man throwing a grenade with an impact fuse out of a plane.
I remember a writer claiming that after his experiences in Italy and France in WWI, that all wars after would center over air superiority. He was damn well right, even though his other prediction, that we would build huge honking land-cruiser tanks to rival battleships, was not. Of course, he was extremly pleased that his idea, the tank, had been built, and I think we can excuse him on that basis.
WWII was an expansion on air superiority. Everything revolved aroung getting your long-range artillery and bomber targeted on a real kill, so you could push them back.
What we have here it the ultimate in air superiority. We can see everything they do, and plop a laser-guided bomb down into their tent twenty-five minutes after they get ballsy enough to set it up. What is left to innovate? The speed of the kill vehicle? The number of kill vehicles available for any one target? Reducing the thirty minutes of time between SuperSekretSpySat-7 taking a picture of that BadGuy going to use the outhouse to a delay small enough to hit him before he finishes wiping? Do we need to watch everybody, all the time, and have the capibility to take out people at any place on the globe at any moment in time?
Apparantly they've become more paranoid.. I remember portscanning.mil subnets as recently as 97-98, though that was from a badly implemented net sampling tool and not through malice. (Line read scan(n_ipb,n_ipc,n_ipa,n_ipd), should have been alphabetic order) For years and years, I used to set the system clock on my CMOS-battery impaired DOS box from the clock on a Air Force server I found manually trolling hosts. Didn't respond to ping, but telnet got me the time..
Don't recall ever hearing from anyone about it. I even tried to send an explaination of the port-scan, but the published email I had bounced.
Botswana. How unfair that we are expected to do more than people who can barely feed themselves!
it makes me wonder why we haven't been voted off the planet yet. (probably has something to do with those nukes;^))
From AP
In three decades, Botswana has moved from being one of the 10 poorest nations to being among the world's upper half in wealth.
and a quick look through the CIA fact-books tells me that over those three decades, we've probably given them almost a billion bucks in foreign aid, not including the one-time bail outs like the 10 million we spent helping them clean up the flood a few years ago, and certainly not adjusting for inflation, I'm too lazy.
There's a reason we ain't been 'voted off' by the 'poor, starving Botswana's, and it sure as hell ain't the nukes.
If I'm thinking this out right, your PC will run hotter then hot itself.. Sure, the temperature is low, but there's very little or no heat transfer medium. Sure, when you leave it out for a week, it'll be near zero, but the second you start generating heat it'll just go up and up and up and...
Go get yourself a hunter case Waltham, Hamilton, or similar. You can generally get a pretty pristine early 20th century gold filled pocket watch and a decent pocket chain for under a couple hundred bucks..
Myself, if I were just starting in them, I'd get what they called $10 watches; A sturdy, plain watch they mass produced for the common fellow..
I started instead with a expensive open-face in solid gold, and I cursed myself everythime I cracked a $120 crystal.
One, it's a rip of a Henry Ford quote. 'You can have a car in whatever color you want, as long as it's black.'
Two, I've said similar things at parties, usually when I had bought $60 in Corona or Heineken for everyone else at a BYOB party and didn't want them touching my Stoli or Grolsch. Mostly along the line of 'Dude, go for one of those Heinies, that's all that's in there.'
Mebbe a little tacky, but not that outlandish either.
Staroffice may be okay, Wordperfect acceptable, and VIM popular, but until a 100% office replacement exists, most places are going to continue to snub Linux as an alternative on the desktop.
Besides, I like Office. MS may have had mega-crappy OS's, but Office always worked right.
Nope. Priority shipping is all bull. The seller could have shipped it parcel-post and it would still probably arrive in those two days..
All priority mail buys you is the ability to get your package stuffed on the plane or the truck before regular mail.
And they dun even stick to it. I sent three letters to California for personal business. One, the registered 1st class made it in four days. The other two took five days, despite the fact one was Priority (2-3 day) and the other was just a plain old unreg, uncert, first class.
For real shipping, you have four options. Airborne, DHL, FedEx, and UPS.
Airborne is cheap, and fast, and I have never had a damage problem properly packed, but they don't guarantee next day everywhere and they have a habit of 'losing' packages for a day. (They're not lost, they just weren't delivered until a day late.) I also managed to sneak a few dozen brand new lappies out wrapped worse than our poor G4-less poster.
FedEx is slightly more expensive, especially on heavyweight items, I've never had *any* damage problems, and they will next day many more places than Airborne, plus P1 will get you 10am delivery. Tracking feels a bit mure sure than Airborne.
UPS I tend to stay away from. Unless they want it on the absolute cheap, and don't care when it gets there, I will not use UPS. UPS also means I spend a lot more on packaging, because by the time I'm done the fscker can live through an airburst shockwave.
DHL I have no opinion of. I've only ever had to send four or five dozen packages with them, so I'm witholding judgement.
Slashdot Mirror
I would love it if my ATM took a fingerprint. There is one thing biometric identification has, convenience. I can't fucking forget it, like I do oh so often with my ATM card, my drivers licence, etc.
Any other use of it, I say fuck em.
You're not a real man until your baby sized toolbox is the 8 drawer Craftsman you keep under the bathroom sink (the entire sink) just in case you need a 1/2 distributor wrench and a pair of vice-grips so you can lift your butt of the toilet after you've shorn the hold down bolts off.
Okay, so you only keep it there (and the arc welder under the stairs, and the Ford timing belt wrench you use as a doorstop, and the acetylene tanks and spare air compressor in the corner of the bedroom closet under the dirty clothes) so your wife can park her car in the garage again without denting her car (or more importantly, scratching your newly-varnished router table) when she pulls into the garage.
The Wright brothers didn't do anything new; It was a glider design gleefuly snagged from somewhere else, and someone elses motor, and you'd be betting safely if you said their props weren't their own invention. The only bit of the plane that was actually covered by a patent was the control system. It was weird, and people did different things. Modern aviation, even though spawned by the Wrights, wouldn't infringe the patent, because it was a wacky way of handling it. Sure, the Wright brothers made a pile of money, but they hampered the advance of the airplane through insane business proceedures, such as the 'Buy before we even let you see it works' trick that caused the Europeans to do things differently and the US government to laugh at them.
As for skyscrapers, they're ugly. Also, there is no IP involved in them, save simple copyright. You can't copy someone elses building word for word and beam for beam, but you better bet you can drive down to the local municipal office and see every inch of the building down to the spacing of rivets and copy every innovative idea.
And the skyscrapers weren't about money; They were a dick-size war among a few wealthy individuals and corporations.
I wouldn't even bother, because there is no such code. IBM's mainframes run multiple copies of Linux not because of modifications to Linux but because of their master virtual machine program, which runs above Linux and is the only thing really running directly on the hardware.
Linux *can* run directly on the hardware, sure, but then your only choice for running mutiple copies under it are the same choices you have when you want to run mutiple copies of that port on PCs, and all of those use the stack and run into the zero copy optimizations.
A bunch of companies make full AM/FM radios in an earbud. Had one a few years ago, cost me a whopping $14, with digital tuning and a L/R/Mono switch. Set one to right, one to left, and use one of those $40 AAA powered FM transmitters.
Mmmm, Erik Estrada..
Odd.. I could swear it was the other way around.
My bad, thanks.
It's not a reference to the website. The website uses a common 'entertainment' 'industry' term. It's a reference to the end of Happy Days, when they were so desperate for ratings the shows featured things like Fonzy jumping a shark on a motorcycle.
If you have x number of real licenses, you can install them on any five machines you choose, including the donated machines. Most manufacturers haven't been dumb enough to ship their servers with anything but a real license anyway, so they're probably transferable.
Microsoft is mentally fibbing a few places to come out with their little guide. I figure this is what MS had in mind when they wrote it.
1. That all PCs have Windows on them from the factory. This isn't exactly untrue for 98% of OEM machines; Even shipped with another OS, the OEM will send you the obligational Windows95 / 98 / ME / etc CD along as well, you've already paid for it in the price of the PC, as per their agreement with Microsoft.
Had a fight with a *ahem* rep once. Ordered a bunch of workstations that were to come with NT4 Workstation, but we specified a pre-arranged software loadout. We recieved the machines with a copy of 95 in every box. Called to return it, was told we had paid for them, that they were not allowed to ship any machine to any company without a paid-for OEM version of Windows, even those that already had licenses for other operating systems, even those that had to already prove we were licensed to install NT4 Server with impunity as part of the deal to get a custom loadout on an OEM system. They had reduced the price on the machines a bit when we had specified the custom load, but not because they weren't including Windows. Because we were going to pay for a cheaper version of Windows that would never see the light of day.
So we got 100 copies of Windows 95 tied to servers that were incapable of even running it. (SMP with a known nasty APIC bug that prevented it from running.)
2. That the computer will come with an operating system on it.
This is nearly patently false. No right-minded business or individual ever donates a PC without wiping it. Also, almost no profit-minded business reinstalls Windows on the machine before resale on the used market or donation. It isn't needed to verify that the machine works, it worked fine before software wipe. It takes time and money to reinstall. The Microsoft EULA is very fuzzy when it comes to transferring a license anyway, and you're not going to eat the potential legal liability of MS going wonky because they interpret the first acceptor of the EULA to be the OEM, the transferee to be you, the limited transferability to be valid, and especially when they think they have a right to march in to seize your equipment sans warrant.
3. That any machine that comes without an OS means a lost sale of Windows to the company that didn't include it. They're calling these people pirates, because if they didn't include it with the machine, they must have it installed illegally on other machines.
Most certainly false. Usually companies hooked on Microsoft products upgrade the OS once before they donate, if the hardware upgrade wasn't the direct effect of Microsoft telling them that they weren't going to be able to buy new Windows licenses of the old version these machines were indoubtably shipped with to keep with growth and replacements. They're being donated because they're three or four year old machines by the time they're donated and no longer able to run the OS Microsoft hawks on you to buy, saying you'll lose your Select/MCAS/MCVR status and be forced to buy individual licenses for retail price if you don't buy now.
Besides, how many of you are going to pirate the old OEM copies of Win98 from the donated machines and put them on the brand new PCs you bought? You know, the ones that came with XP on them? You know, the ones you had to buy because you have to buy XP because MS won't sell you Win98 anymore nor support it?
Wrong. Totally wrong.
There is no situation where you will get only 5% of your bandwidth while everyone else gets 100% of theirs if all the end points are of equal bandwidth. Both your 20 second email download and the greedy hog down the street with a 20 hour Gnutella session will get the same 'peak' bandwidth if there is a saturated bottleneck in the network. The network hog recieves more data, sure, but remember; You're not greedy, all you wanted was your email. Because of the hog(s), it took you five seconds to retreive your email instead of three.
A more correct analogy would be a one seater ride with 9 people riding constantly. You want to ride only ten times, but you think you are entitled to cut ahead of everyone to get your rides simply because they have all ridden before, and will ride again no matter if you cut in front ten times or not.
And as for your math, it's flawed. Look at the 'minimum guaranteed bandwidth' clause in your contract. Sure, everyone can have a sustained bandwidth of T1 speeds, but they are not given that. The ISP takes roughly double the guaranteed bandwidth, multiplies it by the typical number of users in peak times, and buys that much bandwidth. If they only have a 1/10 T1-speed guaranteed downstream and only a peak user base of 1/5 of their paying members they make out like bandits, to the tune of $2500 a month over bandwidth costs. At least in the dialup market, you can count far fewer users online concurrently than one out of five, so realistioally they make out like bigger bandits than my math shows.
Try the Australian mirror as well. Because of discrepancies in the way countries expire copyright, many books are listed on the Australian site that are not available on the main repository.
And before you go bagging fullscale on the US; There are many books listed on the US site that are not on the British. We're not the worst! =)
http://www.gutenberg.net.au
Say a full CD sold there, with all the liner notes and case costs 300 rupees in a store.
That's $6 US.
The cost of pressing a CD is going to be pretty much static (they're already manufactured wherever it's cheapest to do so) at $2.50 US.
Now ask yourself why they charge the US a $16 markup on the music and charge only $3.50 in India.
We're treating the African ISPs the same as we would treat the same sized ISP here in the states. You generate enough traffic, I'll peer with you and we'll split the bill. You don't generate enough traffic? Oh, well. You pay full rate for your bandwidth.
The gentleman was complaining that they're being gouged because the telecom companies are not giving them free money. The ITU decided to be nice and force all the telephone companies to give them a handout on telephone service, and this fellow thinks the ITU should require them to do so on data traffic as well.
My attitude is somewhere between 'Get off yer lazy ass and lay some cable, foo' and 'This guy is worse than the Pontiac street-people that think merely because they exists, the world, and myself by extention, owe him $5 so they can go buy crack or a bottle of Thunderbird.'
Bah. I have a Radio Shack Pocket Computer, now that would make a great webserver. Quasi-serial port built on to it, a cassette interface, and a 250hz processor.
It's already been done to the PC2 (Pocket Computer 2), which had a *real* serial port attachment available for it. That sucker, however, is about five times as powerful as the PC(1).
Barbed wire is a much older invention. Try 1860.
The important parts to World War I were aerial recon, machine guns, and long-range artillery. Oh, and poison gas. And the end of the grand march across Europe, as was done as late as 1880. It gave us real trench warfare too. Of course, it also gave us the laughed at Zeppelins and bombers that were nothing more than a man throwing a grenade with an impact fuse out of a plane.
I remember a writer claiming that after his experiences in Italy and France in WWI, that all wars after would center over air superiority. He was damn well right, even though his other prediction, that we would build huge honking land-cruiser tanks to rival battleships, was not. Of course, he was extremly pleased that his idea, the tank, had been built, and I think we can excuse him on that basis.
WWII was an expansion on air superiority. Everything revolved aroung getting your long-range artillery and bomber targeted on a real kill, so you could push them back.
What we have here it the ultimate in air superiority. We can see everything they do, and plop a laser-guided bomb down into their tent twenty-five minutes after they get ballsy enough to set it up. What is left to innovate? The speed of the kill vehicle? The number of kill vehicles available for any one target? Reducing the thirty minutes of time between SuperSekretSpySat-7 taking a picture of that BadGuy going to use the outhouse to a delay small enough to hit him before he finishes wiping? Do we need to watch everybody, all the time, and have the capibility to take out people at any place on the globe at any moment in time?
Linux does run on a 286. It'll run not only on the 286, but on the 186, the 8088 *and* the 8086.
Caldera's distribution, alas, would not.
It must be horrible to balance his checkbook at the end of the month.
Apparantly they've become more paranoid.. I remember portscanning .mil subnets as recently as 97-98, though that was from a badly implemented net sampling tool and not through malice. (Line read scan(n_ipb,n_ipc,n_ipa,n_ipd), should have been alphabetic order) For years and years, I used to set the system clock on my CMOS-battery impaired DOS box from the clock on a Air Force server I found manually trolling hosts. Didn't respond to ping, but telnet got me the time..
Don't recall ever hearing from anyone about it. I even tried to send an explaination of the port-scan, but the published email I had bounced.
Botswana. How unfair that we are expected to do more than people who can barely feed themselves!
;^))
it makes me wonder why we haven't been voted off the planet yet. (probably has something to do with those nukes
From AP
In three decades, Botswana has moved from being one of the 10 poorest nations to being among the world's upper half in wealth.
and a quick look through the CIA fact-books tells me that over those three decades, we've probably given them almost a billion bucks in foreign aid, not including the one-time bail outs like the 10 million we spent helping them clean up the flood a few years ago, and certainly not adjusting for inflation, I'm too lazy.
There's a reason we ain't been 'voted off' by the 'poor, starving Botswana's, and it sure as hell ain't the nukes.
Launch your PC into the frozen wastes of space?
Nope.
If I'm thinking this out right, your PC will run hotter then hot itself.. Sure, the temperature is low, but there's very little or no heat transfer medium. Sure, when you leave it out for a week, it'll be near zero, but the second you start generating heat it'll just go up and up and up and...
Go get yourself a hunter case Waltham, Hamilton, or similar. You can generally get a pretty pristine early 20th century gold filled pocket watch and a decent pocket chain for under a couple hundred bucks..
Myself, if I were just starting in them, I'd get what they called $10 watches; A sturdy, plain watch they mass produced for the common fellow..
I started instead with a expensive open-face in solid gold, and I cursed myself everythime I cracked a $120 crystal.
I agree it was funny. The mod must have been on cheaper-than-usual crack.
One, it's a rip of a Henry Ford quote. 'You can have a car in whatever color you want, as long as it's black.'
Two, I've said similar things at parties, usually when I had bought $60 in Corona or Heineken for everyone else at a BYOB party and didn't want them touching my Stoli or Grolsch. Mostly along the line of 'Dude, go for one of those Heinies, that's all that's in there.'
Mebbe a little tacky, but not that outlandish either.
Yes!
Staroffice may be okay, Wordperfect acceptable, and VIM popular, but until a 100% office replacement exists, most places are going to continue to snub Linux as an alternative on the desktop.
Besides, I like Office. MS may have had mega-crappy OS's, but Office always worked right.
Nope. Priority shipping is all bull. The seller could have shipped it parcel-post and it would still probably arrive in those two days..
All priority mail buys you is the ability to get your package stuffed on the plane or the truck before regular mail.
And they dun even stick to it. I sent three letters to California for personal business. One, the registered 1st class made it in four days. The other two took five days, despite the fact one was Priority (2-3 day) and the other was just a plain old unreg, uncert, first class.
For real shipping, you have four options. Airborne, DHL, FedEx, and UPS.
Airborne is cheap, and fast, and I have never had a damage problem properly packed, but they don't guarantee next day everywhere and they have a habit of 'losing' packages for a day. (They're not lost, they just weren't delivered until a day late.) I also managed to sneak a few dozen brand new lappies out wrapped worse than our poor G4-less poster.
FedEx is slightly more expensive, especially on heavyweight items, I've never had *any* damage problems, and they will next day many more places than Airborne, plus P1 will get you 10am delivery. Tracking feels a bit mure sure than Airborne.
UPS I tend to stay away from. Unless they want it on the absolute cheap, and don't care when it gets there, I will not use UPS. UPS also means I spend a lot more on packaging, because by the time I'm done the fscker can live through an airburst shockwave.
DHL I have no opinion of. I've only ever had to send four or five dozen packages with them, so I'm witholding judgement.