I've been noticing this a lot over the past couple years with friends bringing their computers for me to fix. I can't correlate to any particular brand of computer or drive. Just seems like a high failure rate in general. I've not been using DVD drives long enough to evaluate reliability, but will probably be on the lookout for good sales to keep one or two in the storage room cause I figure I'm going to be needing them.
followed by the word switch. I've got KVM switches at a couple of the computer stations in my house and love them. I don't multiple boot, I've got separate computers for the different OSes I use. They are very cost-effective. No need for multiple keyboards, mice and video monitors.
"Do the Right Thing. It will gratify some people and astound the rest." - Mark Twain
My wife watches TV as background noise..
on
Our Ratings, Ourselves
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
When she's gone the TVs in the house are OFF. If she's gone for several days, the TV is OFF for all that time. When I'm in a room by myself, the TV is OFF. When we started living together six years ago, she had a TV going 24 hours a day including while we were sleeping. I finally convinced her that she could sleep if it was off and she told me the next day that she had not slept so well in years, I said, "DUH!".
I get my news from the Internet and I get it when I want it and in the degree of detail that I select. I don't want things predigested into a 30 second story and force fed to me. Entertainment on TV? Blech!! There's no entertainment worth watching on TV. "Reality" shows are NOT reality, they are garbage. The various series are uninspired nowadays, or maybe I'm just jaded, but what's the difference?
I don't know if there's much hope for TV, but given the braindead majority of the population, it'll probably go on like this for decades to come. I'm just glad those of us who are capable of thought have options like the Internet, books, live performances and lots of activities that don't involve TV.
"Do the Right Thing. It will gratify some people and astound the rest." - Mark Twain
I'm an Engineer for an elevator company. We're not one of the big ones you would normally think of, but we've put in thousands of elevators in the Midwest during the 20 years I've been with the company. The number of them that have music playing in them = Zero. I've ridden elevators in many other cities from coast to coast across the US and have yet to discover any that had music playing in them. I'm convinced it's just another urban legend.
We've got elevators that talk to you and tell you what floor they are stopping at and which direction they're going next, but no music. Can any of you point out any buildings that have music playing in their elevators?
"Do the Right Thing. It will gratify some people and astound the rest." - Mark Twain
I'd think they be all over this like a duck on a Junebug as they in some of the other cities where the municipality tried to provide this service and got stomped all over. Perhaps Dayton is more on the ball and managed to present a fait accompli. Good for them!
"Do the Right Thing. It will gratify some people and astound the rest." - Mark Twain
that I have used both of them as registrars and found that NetSol was difficult to deal with as compared to GoDaddy. I was taking that as an indication of what kind of company they are in general. I do know the difference between the two terms.
"Do the Right Thing. It will gratify some people and astound the rest." - Mark Twain
yesterday.. "Verisign is right up there with MS and Intuit in my list of evil corporations. All the dealings I've had with Verisign / Network Solutions as a registrar have been nothing but a huge hassle. Please get someone who we can trust. I don't use them at all any more. Godaddy is a LOT less expensive and their telephone support is nothing short of wonderful. Disclaimer: I have no financial interest in Godaddy, but I do have some 90 domains happily registered with them.
"Do the Right Thing. It will gratify some people and astound the rest." - Mark Twain
rational thinking person - "We're from the government and we're here to help."
As so many others have posted, government regulation of the Internet is the death knell of anything resembling free speech and thus the Internet as we know it. Just say NO to governmental regulation.
"Do the Right Thing. It will gratify some people and astound the rest." - Mark Twain
It was intriguing enough by the initial ads and the fact that it's an O'Reilly publication that I subscribed. I think that the articles are a little elementary for serious geeks, but overall it's an OK mag for the general reader. Since it's got articles you can read in a few minutes, it's a nice addition to the collection in the "Reading Room" The price, $14.99, is what I'd expect to pay for a book instead of a magazine, but it's well illustrated and printed in color on good paper stock. I'm seeing some other mags that are pushing this price point, too. I'll be interested to see how this magazine plays out.
"Do the Right Thing. It will gratify some people and astound the rest." - Mark Twain
I posted this when no replies were showing. It may be redundant, but certainly not intentionally so. Give a guy credit where it's due. I have mod points, too, and try to use them with some common sense.
Compatibility with browers has not been a problem for me because I keep away from flash and other bandwidth/resource hogs. I'm keenly aware that a lot of my audience (75,000 visits/month typical on one site) are still using dial-up. I keep my graphics to a reasonable size and, If need to have a large graphic of some sort, I thumbnail it with the size of the larger version indicated. I suspect that most of my pages would not be too bad on a screen size as described, but I've not tried it.
Swiss Army knife.. I can see specialized sites, news, weather and, I suppose, sports scores, offering separate pages optimized for phones, but it's silly, IMO, to think that the majority of sites are going to do this. I'm certainly not planning on doing that with the sites I'm responsible for.
Once again it's the old concept that I want my cell phone to be.....(gasp) just a phone and a good one. I don't need it to be a digital camera, or a can opener.
I've used different sizes of Lexar and PNY drives. I'm using the 1GB Jump Drive now. I've run my Eudora 3.05 Lite mail client like this for a long time. I used to have it on a zip drive, but those DEFINITELY have wear and tear problems. Then I did this technique with CF drives and Smart Media, before I went to the thumbs. Anyway, I've had zero problems doing this on 365 day a year basis in spite of the warnings about limited write cycles. Just in case, though, I do back it up automatically every night.
"Do the Right Thing. It will gratify some people and astound the rest." - Mark Twain
especially now that they have online rebate submission. I've not had a lot of trouble with rebates in general, but agree that it's an irritating practice. My approach is to fill out the rebate forms and get it ready to mail as soon as I get home with the item. I'd say, without having kept accurate records, that my rate of return is about 80%.
"Do the Right Thing. It will gratify some people and astound the rest." - Mark Twain
There's no Internet Explorer, there's no MS Office, etc. The default browser/e-mail client is Mozilla. Open Office is the office suite that comes with Linspire. The only way you'd see an MS ap running on a Linspire machine is if the user has loaded Wine or WinforLin and then an MS application on top of it. Please take a look at the Distrowatch page for Linspire. There are no MS applications that come with this distro. I'd be interested to learn what IP theft and GPL violations were found. Maybe there are some, but I'm not aware of them.
I will give you partial credit on the security issue, but even as it comes without any adjustments, it's still a LOT less prone to the usual attacks against consumer machines with respect to the sorts of malware that infests over 80% of Windows machines connected to the Internet.
Again, my disclaimer that I have no interest in Linspire other than as a user who thinks they are trying to do the right thing in offering an easy to use alternative to the vulnerability plagued Windows OS and make a buck in the process. I've also been using/evaluating Xandros recently and like them very well, too. I'd not hesitate to also recommend it to people looking to break the MS lock.
"Do the Right Thing. It will gratify some people and astound the rest." - Mark Twain
http://distrowatch.com/table.php?distribution=lind ows
Appearantly you've not tried it yourself. There are no MS apps that come with it. While I understand what you are saying about some security issues relating to root access, I have installed Linspire 4.5, on multiple machines and found it to be easy to install, easy to add/remove applications to and found it to be quite serviceable. You can easily add users so as to avoid running as root.
I've really got to give Michael Roberts a lot of credit for his attempt to get the average user away from the grips of Microsoft, spam, viruses and malware. When my son's P4 HP Pavilion ground to a halt with malware, I loaned him an old PII-266 running Linspire 4.5 while I roto-rootered his Windows machine. He and his wife were able to start using it for surfing and e-mail with about 2 minutes training. It worked just fine with winmodem for dialup access, too. Now I'm having trouble getting it back from him.
I'm currently running SuSE 9.2 myself and have experience with RedHat, Fedora, Mandrake, Knoppix and Xandros as well as Linspire. No Linspire doesn't have as much geek appeal, but it's a reasonably good product IMHO. Oh, and no, I have no affiliation with Linspire in any way other than as someone who's tried it.
"Do the Right Thing. It will gratify some people and astound the rest." - Mark Twain
At the elevator company that I am an Engineer for, we've been installing nothing but microprocessor controllers for over 20 years. Yes, I still see working installations dating back decades that use relay logic, but we're replacing them every day with the newer, more compact, more efficient, more reliable microprocessor controllers.
It amazed me 20 years ago when I started working in the industry that I was seeing motor generator sets still used to produce the high current DC to run the motors in many of the traction installations. They are high-maintenance, though, given that they use brushes and commutators that have to be cared for religiously. The carbon dust they give off is very annoying, too. They are rapidly being replaced by solid-state drives.
"Do the Right Thing. It will gratify some people and astound the rest." - Mark Twain
who writes the software for the controllers our company makes. None of our thousands of elevators installed in the past 20 years have any RTC built in. Admittedly our company is a smaller regional company and I can't speak for the larger international companies who do large banks of high-rise elevators. I believe some of those do, indeed, alter traffic patterns depending on time of day and day of week, but even in those cases, it's just the traffic pattern and where the idle elevator park that are affected. An RTC fault won't make them suddenly stop in mid-flight between floors. The worst that I could see happening is that it might take longer to get one to respond to your hall call.
"Do the Right Thing. It will gratify some people and astound the rest." - Mark Twain
The text book was McCraken and Dorn's "Numerical Methods and Programs". Holerith cards, batch jobs, come back tomorrow for your output and all that. I quickly became an early hacker as I figured out that the grad students hung out at the ILLIAC and I could fake a job card and get my output back in a few minutes. That was the era when engineering students carried slide rules around and portable digital calculators didn't exist.
After graduating I worked for a company that used GE's timesharing service with a model 33 teletype machine as an interface. We would punch our fortran programs onto paper tape offline and then load them all at once so as to save those precious fractions of computer CPU time.
My first computer at home was back in 1977 and was an evaluation board that Mostek put out for their F-8 microprocessor. It had 1K of memory, used a teletype machine for I/O and I programmed it by hand assembling code and typing the hex code in. Yes, I had a TI Silent 700 teletype emulator terminal of my own by then that I used with my ham gear through a ASCII to Baudot code converter that I built with logic circuits on wire-wrapped boards. Where did I get all that energy?
My next home computer was an Ohio Scientific with a 6502 processor and a whopping 16K of salvaged 2102 RAM chips. I wasn't into gaming and mostly used my first two computers as development tools for some products I designed using first the F-8 and then 6502. To this point all programming was assembly language hand assembled. None of that fancy assembler stuff as it was too expensive.
My day job had me using an Intel development system with 8" floppies designing products, first with the 8085 and then later for the "bleeding edge" 8051 chips.
My first home computer with a real OS was an Osborne running CP/M. Then in 1981 IBM came out with the PC junior and Apple soon followed with the early Mac with no HD and a single floppy, both of which I had to have. My wife ended up grabbing the Mac for her college papers and the PC was mine, running DOS 2.1. I was using Wordstar and SuperCalc back then for my "Office suite", and xasm85 for product development. To this day I use the same cross-assembler to maintain and update legacy products that are still in daily use. Ah, the memories.. sigh.. The Mac is long gone, but then so is the first wife.:-)
"Do the Right Thing. It will gratify some people and astound the rest." - Mark Twain
A: Very likely. Contrary to your belief, it does not require that Joe Ham have a lot of power or a huge antenna on a tower to communicate with the other side of the world. Nor does it require repeaters on the HF frequencies.
I've been an FCC licensed Ham since 1958 at age 12 and operate only with low power (QRP to us hams) as a challenge precisely because making long distance contacts was too easy with even moderate power (say 100 watts) and modest wire antennas. I've communicated directly with Japan and New Zealand from my car in Illinois using a 4 watt transmitter and a 4 foot antenna on the trunk. If you get up to around 100 Watts and a reasonable wire antenna hung up in the trees in the back yard, you can very easily talk anywhere in the world, given reasonable conditions.
What good is it from the other end? I was with Project Hope in Tunisia in 1969 and provided daily "phone-patched" phone call service to the staff of about 150 people so they could stay in touch with their families back home, without having to pay the $13.00 for the first 3 minutes that the landline cost. It made a huge difference to the people on the hospital ship. In disaster situations, it's orders of magnitude more important. Some of my fellow hams here in the states provided similar communications for military and Antarctic bases for years.
To learn more about Amateur Radio, visit the ARRL website. ARRL Oh, and please, please, do not lump us in with CB folks, as nice as some of them are. Hams are tested and licensed to FCC standards prior to being allowed to put their transmitters on the air.
"Do the Right Thing. It will gratify some people and astound the rest." - Mark Twain
Mapquest is worse than Yahoo, but they both are years out of date for the roads in my neighborhood and both are useless in giving directions to our house. A railroad that was taken out some ten years ago and converted to a bike path is still on Mapquest. Both maps show a road that has been closed and don't have a new road that replaces it hundreds of yards away.
Last year I was scanning Popular Science and saw an ad for a Garmin GPS with a street map on the color display. Lo and behold, it was centered on my house, but it was screwed up as I related above. We wrote to them and told them that if they really used that map, people would be getting lost in my area if they used their unit since that road isn't there any more and, oh, about that railroad.. They replied that they'd be in contact with their map source (Looks like Mapquest) and would be sure to get it corrected... Over a year later, it's still inaccurate.
I can understand that it's a huge task to keep things like that updated, but when you get information handed to you about inaccurace, you'd think it'd get fixed within a few months.
"Do the Right Thing. It will gratify some people and astound the rest." - Mark Twain
Slashdot Mirror
I've been noticing this a lot over the past couple years with friends bringing their computers for me to fix. I can't correlate to any particular brand of computer or drive. Just seems like a high failure rate in general. I've not been using DVD drives long enough to evaluate reliability, but will probably be on the lookout for good sales to keep one or two in the storage room cause I figure I'm going to be needing them.
followed by the word switch. I've got KVM switches at a couple of the computer stations in my house and love them. I don't multiple boot, I've got separate computers for the different OSes I use. They are very cost-effective. No need for multiple keyboards, mice and video monitors.
"Do the Right Thing. It will gratify some people and astound the rest." - Mark Twain
When she's gone the TVs in the house are OFF. If she's gone for several days, the TV is OFF for all that time. When I'm in a room by myself, the TV is OFF. When we started living together six years ago, she had a TV going 24 hours a day including while we were sleeping. I finally convinced her that she could sleep if it was off and she told me the next day that she had not slept so well in years, I said, "DUH!".
I get my news from the Internet and I get it when I want it and in the degree of detail that I select. I don't want things predigested into a 30 second story and force fed to me. Entertainment on TV? Blech!! There's no entertainment worth watching on TV. "Reality" shows are NOT reality, they are garbage. The various series are uninspired nowadays, or maybe I'm just jaded, but what's the difference?
I don't know if there's much hope for TV, but given the braindead majority of the population, it'll probably go on like this for decades to come. I'm just glad those of us who are capable of thought have options like the Internet, books, live performances and lots of activities that don't involve TV.
"Do the Right Thing. It will gratify some people and astound the rest." - Mark Twain
I'm an Engineer for an elevator company. We're not one of the big ones you would normally think of, but we've put in thousands of elevators in the Midwest during the 20 years I've been with the company. The number of them that have music playing in them = Zero. I've ridden elevators in many other cities from coast to coast across the US and have yet to discover any that had music playing in them. I'm convinced it's just another urban legend.
We've got elevators that talk to you and tell you what floor they are stopping at and which direction they're going next, but no music. Can any of you point out any buildings that have music playing in their elevators?
"Do the Right Thing. It will gratify some people and astound the rest." - Mark Twain
I'd think they be all over this like a duck on a Junebug as they in some of the other cities where the municipality tried to provide this service and got stomped all over. Perhaps Dayton is more on the ball and managed to present a fait accompli. Good for them!
"Do the Right Thing. It will gratify some people and astound the rest." - Mark Twain
that I have used both of them as registrars and found that NetSol was difficult to deal with as compared to GoDaddy. I was taking that as an indication of what kind of company they are in general. I do know the difference between the two terms.
"Do the Right Thing. It will gratify some people and astound the rest." - Mark Twain
yesterday.. "Verisign is right up there with MS and Intuit in my list of evil corporations. All the dealings I've had with Verisign / Network Solutions as a registrar have been nothing but a huge hassle. Please get someone who we can trust. I don't use them at all any more. Godaddy is a LOT less expensive and their telephone support is nothing short of wonderful. Disclaimer: I have no financial interest in Godaddy, but I do have some 90 domains happily registered with them.
"Do the Right Thing. It will gratify some people and astound the rest." - Mark Twain
"Very soon, but not less that a week."
"Do the Right Thing. It will gratify some people and astound the rest." - Mark Twain
rational thinking person - "We're from the government and we're here to help."
As so many others have posted, government regulation of the Internet is the death knell of anything resembling free speech and thus the Internet as we know it. Just say NO to governmental regulation.
"Do the Right Thing. It will gratify some people and astound the rest." - Mark Twain
It was intriguing enough by the initial ads and the fact that it's an O'Reilly publication that I subscribed. I think that the articles are a little elementary for serious geeks, but overall it's an OK mag for the general reader. Since it's got articles you can read in a few minutes, it's a nice addition to the collection in the "Reading Room" The price, $14.99, is what I'd expect to pay for a book instead of a magazine, but it's well illustrated and printed in color on good paper stock. I'm seeing some other mags that are pushing this price point, too. I'll be interested to see how this magazine plays out.
"Do the Right Thing. It will gratify some people and astound the rest." - Mark Twain
I posted this when no replies were showing. It may be redundant, but certainly not intentionally so. Give a guy credit where it's due. I have mod points, too, and try to use them with some common sense.
Now is that RAID 1? I never can keep those straight.
Seriously this is a very interesting development with important implications.
Compatibility with browers has not been a problem for me because I keep away from flash and other bandwidth/resource hogs. I'm keenly aware that a lot of my audience (75,000 visits/month typical on one site) are still using dial-up. I keep my graphics to a reasonable size and, If need to have a large graphic of some sort, I thumbnail it with the size of the larger version indicated. I suspect that most of my pages would not be too bad on a screen size as described, but I've not tried it.
Swiss Army knife.. I can see specialized sites, news, weather and, I suppose, sports scores, offering separate pages optimized for phones, but it's silly, IMO, to think that the majority of sites are going to do this. I'm certainly not planning on doing that with the sites I'm responsible for.
Once again it's the old concept that I want my cell phone to be.....(gasp) just a phone and a good one. I don't need it to be a digital camera, or a can opener.
I've used different sizes of Lexar and PNY drives. I'm using the 1GB Jump Drive now. I've run my Eudora 3.05 Lite mail client like this for a long time. I used to have it on a zip drive, but those DEFINITELY have wear and tear problems. Then I did this technique with CF drives and Smart Media, before I went to the thumbs. Anyway, I've had zero problems doing this on 365 day a year basis in spite of the warnings about limited write cycles. Just in case, though, I do back it up automatically every night.
"Do the Right Thing. It will gratify some people and astound the rest." - Mark Twain
especially now that they have online rebate submission. I've not had a lot of trouble with rebates in general, but agree that it's an irritating practice. My approach is to fill out the rebate forms and get it ready to mail as soon as I get home with the item. I'd say, without having kept accurate records, that my rate of return is about 80%.
"Do the Right Thing. It will gratify some people and astound the rest." - Mark Twain
There's no Internet Explorer, there's no MS Office, etc. The default browser/e-mail client is Mozilla. Open Office is the office suite that comes with Linspire. The only way you'd see an MS ap running on a Linspire machine is if the user has loaded Wine or WinforLin and then an MS application on top of it. Please take a look at the Distrowatch page for Linspire. There are no MS applications that come with this distro. I'd be interested to learn what IP theft and GPL violations were found. Maybe there are some, but I'm not aware of them.
d ows
I will give you partial credit on the security issue, but even as it comes without any adjustments, it's still a LOT less prone to the usual attacks against consumer machines with respect to the sorts of malware that infests over 80% of Windows machines connected to the Internet.
Again, my disclaimer that I have no interest in Linspire other than as a user who thinks they are trying to do the right thing in offering an easy to use alternative to the vulnerability plagued Windows OS and make a buck in the process. I've also been using/evaluating Xandros recently and like them very well, too. I'd not hesitate to also recommend it to people looking to break the MS lock.
"Do the Right Thing. It will gratify some people and astound the rest." - Mark Twain
http://distrowatch.com/table.php?distribution=lin
Appearantly you've not tried it yourself. There are no MS apps that come with it. While I understand what you are saying about some security issues relating to root access, I have installed Linspire 4.5, on multiple machines and found it to be easy to install, easy to add/remove applications to and found it to be quite serviceable. You can easily add users so as to avoid running as root.
I've really got to give Michael Roberts a lot of credit for his attempt to get the average user away from the grips of Microsoft, spam, viruses and malware. When my son's P4 HP Pavilion ground to a halt with malware, I loaned him an old PII-266 running Linspire 4.5 while I roto-rootered his Windows machine. He and his wife were able to start using it for surfing and e-mail with about 2 minutes training. It worked just fine with winmodem for dialup access, too. Now I'm having trouble getting it back from him.
I'm currently running SuSE 9.2 myself and have experience with RedHat, Fedora, Mandrake, Knoppix and Xandros as well as Linspire. No Linspire doesn't have as much geek appeal, but it's a reasonably good product IMHO. Oh, and no, I have no affiliation with Linspire in any way other than as someone who's tried it.
"Do the Right Thing. It will gratify some people and astound the rest." - Mark Twain
At the elevator company that I am an Engineer for, we've been installing nothing but microprocessor controllers for over 20 years. Yes, I still see working installations dating back decades that use relay logic, but we're replacing them every day with the newer, more compact, more efficient, more reliable microprocessor controllers.
It amazed me 20 years ago when I started working in the industry that I was seeing motor generator sets still used to produce the high current DC to run the motors in many of the traction installations. They are high-maintenance, though, given that they use brushes and commutators that have to be cared for religiously. The carbon dust they give off is very annoying, too. They are rapidly being replaced by solid-state drives.
"Do the Right Thing. It will gratify some people and astound the rest." - Mark Twain
who writes the software for the controllers our company makes. None of our thousands of elevators installed in the past 20 years have any RTC built in. Admittedly our company is a smaller regional company and I can't speak for the larger international companies who do large banks of high-rise elevators. I believe some of those do, indeed, alter traffic patterns depending on time of day and day of week, but even in those cases, it's just the traffic pattern and where the idle elevator park that are affected. An RTC fault won't make them suddenly stop in mid-flight between floors. The worst that I could see happening is that it might take longer to get one to respond to your hall call.
"Do the Right Thing. It will gratify some people and astound the rest." - Mark Twain
and declare this discussion terminated. Read about Godwin's law here.
"Do the Right Thing. It will gratify some people and astound the rest." - Mark Twain
The text book was McCraken and Dorn's "Numerical Methods and Programs". Holerith cards, batch jobs, come back tomorrow for your output and all that. I quickly became an early hacker as I figured out that the grad students hung out at the ILLIAC and I could fake a job card and get my output back in a few minutes. That was the era when engineering students carried slide rules around and portable digital calculators didn't exist.
:-)
After graduating I worked for a company that used GE's timesharing service with a model 33 teletype machine as an interface. We would punch our fortran programs onto paper tape offline and then load them all at once so as to save those precious fractions of computer CPU time.
My first computer at home was back in 1977 and was an evaluation board that Mostek put out for their F-8 microprocessor. It had 1K of memory, used a teletype machine for I/O and I programmed it by hand assembling code and typing the hex code in. Yes, I had a TI Silent 700 teletype emulator terminal of my own by then that I used with my ham gear through a ASCII to Baudot code converter that I built with logic circuits on wire-wrapped boards. Where did I get all that energy?
My next home computer was an Ohio Scientific with a 6502 processor and a whopping 16K of salvaged 2102 RAM chips. I wasn't into gaming and mostly used my first two computers as development tools for some products I designed using first the F-8 and then 6502. To this point all programming was assembly language hand assembled. None of that fancy assembler stuff as it was too expensive.
My day job had me using an Intel development system with 8" floppies designing products, first with the 8085 and then later for the "bleeding edge" 8051 chips.
My first home computer with a real OS was an Osborne running CP/M. Then in 1981 IBM came out with the PC junior and Apple soon followed with the early Mac with no HD and a single floppy, both of which I had to have. My wife ended up grabbing the Mac for her college papers and the PC was mine, running DOS 2.1. I was using Wordstar and SuperCalc back then for my "Office suite", and xasm85 for product development. To this day I use the same cross-assembler to maintain and update legacy products that are still in daily use. Ah, the memories.. sigh.. The Mac is long gone, but then so is the first wife.
"Do the Right Thing. It will gratify some people and astound the rest." - Mark Twain
A: Very likely. Contrary to your belief, it does not require that Joe Ham have a lot of power or a huge antenna on a tower to communicate with the other side of the world. Nor does it require repeaters on the HF frequencies.
I've been an FCC licensed Ham since 1958 at age 12 and operate only with low power (QRP to us hams) as a challenge precisely because making long distance contacts was too easy with even moderate power (say 100 watts) and modest wire antennas. I've communicated directly with Japan and New Zealand from my car in Illinois using a 4 watt transmitter and a 4 foot antenna on the trunk. If you get up to around 100 Watts and a reasonable wire antenna hung up in the trees in the back yard, you can very easily talk anywhere in the world, given reasonable conditions.
What good is it from the other end? I was with Project Hope in Tunisia in 1969 and provided daily "phone-patched" phone call service to the staff of about 150 people so they could stay in touch with their families back home, without having to pay the $13.00 for the first 3 minutes that the landline cost. It made a huge difference to the people on the hospital ship. In disaster situations, it's orders of magnitude more important. Some of my fellow hams here in the states provided similar communications for military and Antarctic bases for years.
To learn more about Amateur Radio, visit the ARRL website. ARRL Oh, and please, please, do not lump us in with CB folks, as nice as some of them are. Hams are tested and licensed to FCC standards prior to being allowed to put their transmitters on the air.
"Do the Right Thing. It will gratify some people and astound the rest." - Mark Twain
IP license from SCOG. Coincidence?? I don't think so.
"Do the Right Thing. It will gratify some people and astound the rest." - Mark Twain
Mapquest is worse than Yahoo, but they both are years out of date for the roads in my neighborhood and both are useless in giving directions to our house. A railroad that was taken out some ten years ago and converted to a bike path is still on Mapquest. Both maps show a road that has been closed and don't have a new road that replaces it hundreds of yards away.
Last year I was scanning Popular Science and saw an ad for a Garmin GPS with a street map on the color display. Lo and behold, it was centered on my house, but it was screwed up as I related above. We wrote to them and told them that if they really used that map, people would be getting lost in my area if they used their unit since that road isn't there any more and, oh, about that railroad.. They replied that they'd be in contact with their map source (Looks like Mapquest) and would be sure to get it corrected... Over a year later, it's still inaccurate.
I can understand that it's a huge task to keep things like that updated, but when you get information handed to you about inaccurace, you'd think it'd get fixed within a few months.
"Do the Right Thing. It will gratify some people and astound the rest." - Mark Twain