I saw Pink Floyd in Edmonton once. They were in the middle of an extended solo and the band got LOST! It was hilarious. Being a drummer, I've been there. You could tell that nobody knew where to come back in and were kinda playing chicken... should I go now... how bout now... Took em a few bars and it was a messy turnaround, but I don't think anybody else in the audience even heard it. I know my two buddies had no idea. Sure boosted my self-confidence.. shit if Pink Floyd can screw up on stage after playing for over 20 years, I don't feel so bad when I do:-)
Personally, I've seen some neat places, but none of them seem to survive any more than a couple years. Good luck, I don't know what you'd have to do to be profitable.
I would often try to fix without the format.. but more often than not, that's where I'd end up. I didn't want to waste 5 hours scouring the registry when the customer wouldn't pay for that time either.
Wipe it, put on AVG, Netscape and Ad-aware and most times I'd never see the customer again unless they wanted an upgrade. They'd tell all their friends and I was busy.
Hardware problems were pretty easy to fix after a bit of experience. The most challenging lesson I had to learn was with modems. I'd get these things that would install and test perfectly, yet wouldn't dial out. Finally had a customer come in complaining of a bad modem and a recent thunderstorm. Bingo. Same symptoms. That little lesson saved me hours later on, though it took a while to actually figure out.
What was even more fun was that the ping issue was intermittant. Do a ping -n 100 and about every twenty pings it would timeout.
Switched the card, no more calls, no more problems.
And btw, it wasn't me that fucked up, this was the customers shit hooked up to Motorola wireless running on the supernet fibre. Every other customer in the area was fine... playing the same game on the same servers. It WAS his shitty nic.
IMNSHO, most latency is caused by "CRAPPY $5 onboard NETWORK CARDS!"
Get a 3com NIC and be done with it. I've seen a machine getting pings of 200 to 300 and when I switched the crap card to a real 3com the ping times went down to 50.There is a reason that 3com charges $35 for their cards... they work well. I use them exclusively in my network.
I'm using an ATI AIW, I think it's a 64 meg card. Not the best but works fine for my purposes. I use the standard Mpeg 1 quarter resolution settings and record them at 1.6 meg I think. I then run them through TmpgENC and clean up the edges, the length and the bitrate. I forget what I have it set to now but it drops the file size down to about 300 megs for half an hour of video. It may be a time consuming process... but you only have to do it once. Can't imagine how much time I wasted rewinding tapes over the years... I should mention that this is in an Asus board with an XP2200+ cpu and about a gig of ram.
I agree about you point on the "legality". I'm NOT buying this stuff two and three times cause my kids ripped the tape out of the cassette! I'm in Canada, and we don't have the same copyright laws as the states. They've been trying to clamp down here, but every time they(**IA)go to court, the courts here give us more rights.
I've done the same kind of thing. Have the server in the basement and all the kids shows ripped from vhs or dvd. I got sick of the rewinding and the problems with the vcrs.
They see the shows they want without the beginning ads, I can cue up an hours worth and the only use of the vhs now is to rip the tapes (on a faster machine in the basemenet as well)
All this works on a Compaq p3- 733 with a 64 meg tv-out into my ancient analog tv. Works great and not that much worse than the original vcr. The kids sure don't mind. The files sizes for a half hour show are about 350 megs in Mpeg format. I use a wireless mouse from the coffee table and it works great.
FWIW, I think the only ones that will adopt this "convergence" are the geeks and they'll make the computers themselves.
Actually, during the last recession in Southern Ontario, just about anybody would take Canadian Tire Money. Stores, Restaurants etc. The logic at the time was that the Canadian Tire money was actually MORE stable than the Canadian dollar because the company stood behind it with their assets.
IIRC, the canuck peso was 65 cents to the american dollar at the time.
In my opinion Xandros was more polished than other distros. It just seemed to work regardless of the machine I put it on. I used to be a dealer for them way back at version 1.
That being said, I've also seen it screw up the mbr after doing an update. I was not impressed. The next thing I saw that I didn't like was how they had shifted away from a debian base and are basically a proprietary linux. I tried in version 2 to install bzflag. The os downloaded about 150 megs of "updates" to make bz work. It then went on and broke a lot of the Xandros apps. This has only become worse with time.
If you are satisfied with what they have for apps in "their" repository, go for it. If you need to install anything else, I'd say go to an Ubuntu distro instead. Ubuntu works as well from what I've seen and you can install software from debian repositories.
My fav games are BZFlag and Rise of Nations. Easy to learn, no hoops to jump through. I've been playing both of these for years. (Age of Empires, same thing as RON)
I also only play those linear games once. Once is enough... cheat codes (I'm a lousy gamer) walkthrough manual.. I don't really like those that much. Age could be a factor too.. Mid 40's... no patience or time anymore.
I dumped my Hotmail account as soon as MS bought it. I'll do the same with Paypal and Ebay. Ebay kind of sucks now anyway... too many scammers. Paypal has no protection either. Got ripped off for $300 once... only once. You seemed to have "protection" until you actually need it. The credit card co couldn't do anything because paypal acted as a proxy. I was real happy when I found that out.. pricks./end rant
Microsoft would probably clamp down real hard on anyone re-selling MS products on ebay as well. I see this as a step to force people to upgrade to Vista. Pretty hard to chug along with win2k if you can't find a license.
Not without a proper mesh network. Just got back from a Motorola conference. There was one company that claims it's possible. http://www.extricom.com/ They turn the spectrum into 3 clouds, instead of many areas. The clouds sit on top of one another so that you can cover a larger area with one channel.
I can't imagine doing this over a city. The costs would be insane.
That band should give decent coverage though. We use 2.4 ghz motorolas and they can shoot 25kms.
I have a p3-700 hooked up to my tv. I have a wireless mouse. I click the show I want to see, (stored on a server in the basement) and use my all in one remote for sound level.
Why must we always make this so complicated in the name of simplicity? So mom and pop that can't keep spyware from killing their machine can have this "fun new technology" in their living room.
Honestly, this shit will never fly. The Geeks will figure out how to do it themselves..and the technologically challenged will use their dvd players.
I had a windows 95C disk once.. don't know what happened to it but it was pretty slick. It was basically the exact same as win98 first edition. As stated in the post above, you could remove ie and make win95 look and act like win95 again.
You could completely remove ie from that os. I was surprised that the DOJ didn't get their hands on one of those copies.
Too bad you guys don't have a supernet. I'm selling wireless to every small town in Alberta that I can find. 1.5 mbps service, same price as in the city. The whole province (rural) is hoping that this can revitalize the small town. Lots of city workers are tired of the rat race and would love to move to the country. Land is cheap, the towns are safe.. great place to raise a family.
I moved here from southern ontario. There was 7 million people in a 60 mile radius there.. about 117 thousand in the same space here. Houses are 1/4 the cost, everything else is cheaper as well. I love Alberta!
I gave up on Maxtor after having 3 bad drives in a week. While I was in the rma dept, a couple other guys came in with more. The tech told us that since they dropped the warranty to 1 year, he felt that they totally fired the quality control deptartment. We had been buying Maxtors for a couple of years but this was turning into an avalance of dead drives.
I started buying Seagate for the 5 year warranty and have been impressed. They were the only drives that I'd buy anymore. I don't like this idea of the merger. It's like when Maxtor bought Quantum.. they kept the Maxtor name but used quantum technology and we see how that turned out.
Guess I better buy a few spare drives before the Maxtor tech creeps into otherwise excellent hard drives.
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I saw Pink Floyd in Edmonton once. They were in the middle of an extended solo and the band got LOST! It was hilarious. Being a drummer, I've been there. You could tell that nobody knew where to come back in and were kinda playing chicken... should I go now... how bout now... Took em a few bars and it was a messy turnaround, but I don't think anybody else in the audience even heard it. I know my two buddies had no idea. Sure boosted my self-confidence.. shit if Pink Floyd can screw up on stage after playing for over 20 years, I don't feel so bad when I do :-)
Personally, I've seen some neat places, but none of them seem to survive any more than a couple years. Good luck, I don't know what you'd have to do to be profitable.
Wipe it, put on AVG, Netscape and Ad-aware and most times I'd never see the customer again unless they wanted an upgrade. They'd tell all their friends and I was busy.
Hardware problems were pretty easy to fix after a bit of experience. The most challenging lesson I had to learn was with modems. I'd get these things that would install and test perfectly, yet wouldn't dial out. Finally had a customer come in complaining of a bad modem and a recent thunderstorm. Bingo. Same symptoms. That little lesson saved me hours later on, though it took a while to actually figure out.
Switched the card, no more calls, no more problems.
And btw, it wasn't me that fucked up, this was the customers shit hooked up to Motorola wireless running on the supernet fibre. Every other customer in the area was fine... playing the same game on the same servers. It WAS his shitty nic.
I've turned off so many onboard cards, realtek and via especially and replaced them with 3com and all of a sudden.. no more network problems.
Get a 3com NIC and be done with it. I've seen a machine getting pings of 200 to 300 and when I switched the crap card to a real 3com the ping times went down to 50.There is a reason that 3com charges $35 for their cards... they work well. I use them exclusively in my network.
Shitty hardware always causes problems.
I agree about you point on the "legality". I'm NOT buying this stuff two and three times cause my kids ripped the tape out of the cassette! I'm in Canada, and we don't have the same copyright laws as the states. They've been trying to clamp down here, but every time they(**IA)go to court, the courts here give us more rights.
mr-b
They see the shows they want without the beginning ads, I can cue up an hours worth and the only use of the vhs now is to rip the tapes (on a faster machine in the basemenet as well)
All this works on a Compaq p3- 733 with a 64 meg tv-out into my ancient analog tv. Works great and not that much worse than the original vcr. The kids sure don't mind. The files sizes for a half hour show are about 350 megs in Mpeg format. I use a wireless mouse from the coffee table and it works great.
FWIW, I think the only ones that will adopt this "convergence" are the geeks and they'll make the computers themselves.
IIRC, the canuck peso was 65 cents to the american dollar at the time.
That being said, I've also seen it screw up the mbr after doing an update. I was not impressed. The next thing I saw that I didn't like was how they had shifted away from a debian base and are basically a proprietary linux. I tried in version 2 to install bzflag. The os downloaded about 150 megs of "updates" to make bz work. It then went on and broke a lot of the Xandros apps. This has only become worse with time.
If you are satisfied with what they have for apps in "their" repository, go for it. If you need to install anything else, I'd say go to an Ubuntu distro instead. Ubuntu works as well from what I've seen and you can install software from debian repositories.
What's 200 feet long, blue, with an asshole at each end.....
An Alberta Checkstop
My head asplode from the irony...
2.4 will do 25km and 7 mbit aggregate. Perfectly fine for 1.5 mbps home applications.
I love the SuperNet!
These lawsuits only piss people off.
My fav games are BZFlag and Rise of Nations. Easy to learn, no hoops to jump through. I've been playing both of these for years. (Age of Empires, same thing as RON) I also only play those linear games once. Once is enough... cheat codes (I'm a lousy gamer) walkthrough manual.. I don't really like those that much. Age could be a factor too.. Mid 40's ... no patience or time anymore.
Microsoft would probably clamp down real hard on anyone re-selling MS products on ebay as well. I see this as a step to force people to upgrade to Vista. Pretty hard to chug along with win2k if you can't find a license.
I can't imagine doing this over a city. The costs would be insane.
That band should give decent coverage though. We use 2.4 ghz motorolas and they can shoot 25kms.
Still don't think that this is very viable.
http://deadtroll.com/video/helldeskcable.html
Enjoy!
http://canopywireless.com/ 2.4 ghz range. Works perfectly.
So easy.
Glad I don't live in America.
Why must we always make this so complicated in the name of simplicity? So mom and pop that can't keep spyware from killing their machine can have this "fun new technology" in their living room.
Honestly, this shit will never fly. The Geeks will figure out how to do it themselves..and the technologically challenged will use their dvd players.
You could completely remove ie from that os. I was surprised that the DOJ didn't get their hands on one of those copies.
Think frog in the boiling pot analogy.
I moved here from southern ontario. There was 7 million people in a 60 mile radius there.. about 117 thousand in the same space here. Houses are 1/4 the cost, everything else is cheaper as well. I love Alberta!
I started buying Seagate for the 5 year warranty and have been impressed. They were the only drives that I'd buy anymore. I don't like this idea of the merger. It's like when Maxtor bought Quantum.. they kept the Maxtor name but used quantum technology and we see how that turned out.
Guess I better buy a few spare drives before the Maxtor tech creeps into otherwise excellent hard drives.