I'm a computer geek and I only use about 30 gigs a month (on a different provider). I don't really see what the problem is.
A friend works at a local ISP and he tells me that 0.1% of the customers use as much bandwidth as I do. That's a very tiny percentage.
If people want to use the Internet to download massive amounts of p2p content, do they really expect they should pay the same as Grandma who checks her email once a day? Bandwidth is a finite resource, even if we don't believe it.
Just remember that you can't get full speed on Bluetooth. Bluetooth is good up to about 2Mbps (going by memory, that might not be exact). The iPhone 3G is capable of 3.6 Mbps and the 3GS, 7.2 Mbps. You won't get full speed in the real world but I've gotten over 5 Mbps on a HSUPA data stick so you can certainly do better than Bluetooth can do.
Bluetooth is certainly more convenient, but there is a price for the convenience. Battery life is lower, too, since all that Bluetooth reception and transmission takes power. (And if you're on AC on your laptop, your iPhone will be happily charging away if you're on USB.)
Tethering isn't an Apple thing - it's an AT&T thing. I have an iPhone on Rogers in Canada and I can tether just fine. All you need with Rogers is a data plan giving 1 gigabyte or more and they include the feature at no extra cost.
The only time a manual transmission is boring or annoying is in gridlock. In traffic that is moving, or even better, on empty roads, manual transmissions change mindless, boring driving to a fun experience - at least for me.
The problem is that most people crank their defroster to maximum fan speed and that makes the engine take forever to warm up . The secret is to put the fan on a low speed (even 1) and don't be in the car for a minute or so (while you clear the windows), then ease it up to 2 and start going. Notch the fan up as you notice your temp gauge going up. Don't use maximum speed unless your engine is at full operating temperature. Even then, very small engines in very cold weather will lose heat at maximum fan speed unless they're actually driving (i.e. the engine is under load); idling at full fan speed may still result in the engine cooling off.
I start my engine, leave the fan on low, turn on my seat warmer, clear the windows, and by the time the windows are scraped, I drive. Drive gently and easily until the engine is warmer. That way I get heat quickly and I am friendlier to the environment.
If the interior of your car is really humid and you're getting frost inside on the windows, turn on the air conditioning. This will help to sublimate the ice faster. (Keep the heat turned to the warmest temperature, of course. It'll still warm up your car - but with air with less humidity in it, which helps to remove the frost and ice.)
I played World of Warcraft on dialup... last summer. I wanted to see if it could be done. It can. I'm sure it would annoy some. Walking around Stormwind is certainly painful, since there are always a lot of players around, but soloing is fine.
This is with v.90 at my cottage, and a connection rate (according to my lovely US Robotics Courier v.90 v.Everything modem) of about 45333 bps down, 33600 bps up.
You might ask why I tried it. The answer is that the latency of the EDGE cellular connection that I have there is absolutely painful (close to 500 ms at times compared to about 150-200 ms on v.90). Latency is more important than transfer rate for a lot of applications.
None of the other posters (that I've seen at least) have recommended that you upgrade the hard disk. You absolutely can. It will be some work but it will be worth it. A multi-gigabyte hard disk will make your system a lot more useful.
That's from my 486sx25 with 32 MB of RAM. No X, though. And not a laptop.
Just remember that you need a/boot partition if your machine can't natively see large hard disks. My machine choked hard on the 2.2G IDE drive I put into it, so a 100-megabyte/boot solved the problem nicely.
Maximize the RAM. This will help too. Unfortunately 32 MB is the maximum mine will take. (In theory it might take more; there are larger 30-pin SIMMs than I'm using now, but my machine wasn't built for them, so I haven't bothered trying them. They might work but they would probably be a waste of money.)
This is a waste of time. Some wastes of time are still fun. If it entertains you to do this, do it. I keep my 486 running out of nostalgia only (it was my first *nix box).
Incidentally if you want some low-end box projects, check out http://www.lowendbox.com/wiki... the author is really interested in very modest VPSes (sub-$5 a month for many) but the principles would apply to modest whole-computer systems too. I put lighttpd on my 486 out of inspiration from that wiki.
Double density is what these drives used, and high density are easier to find. Is that what you meant?
Single density disks weren't that commonly used. The only reasonably common system I can think of that used them was the Atari 8-bit machines, and even then only if you had the original 810 5.25" disk drive. The later 1050 used double density disks (but could read and write single density disks with a lower capacity).
I was in a keeper league for ten years ('92-'01). It was a lot of fun. We played a 128-game season - 40 man rosters (25 active until "Declaration Day" which was around Game 100, equivalent to September 1 in the MLB schedule) after which you could use any of the 40 players. Of course, since we didn't have minor leagues a lot of the extra 15 players were prospects or players who had had bad seasons that we were keeping for the future.
I was the worst team in our league in the first season. I got into the playoffs for the first time in the fifth season and was in them every season afterwards. I won one league championship and lost in game seven of two other championships. We had ten teams at first, twelve for some of the years so I think I did respectably.
I still talk to some of the league members so the friendships built are real.
Lots of memories... probably the best was in game four of the World Series that I won. I was up two games to one but was losing by three in the ninth. With two out and two on, my centre fielder Ken Griffey Jr. hammered one over the wall to tie the game. I gave up a run in the twelfth and Griffey bailed me out again with a one-out solo shot. In the fourteenth with the score still tied, Griffey hit his third of the game, a walk-off solo shot for the win. Yes, this game is cards and dice, but that game was incredibly intense.
In 1,280 regular season games I had only one no-hitter. Ironically it was pitched by Roger Clemens, who never pitched one in real life. Our league never saw a perfect game and only saw about half a dozen no-hitters.
I had Mark McGwire the year he hit 70 home runs in real life and he hit 60 in 128 games and another ten in two playoff rounds for me to finish at 70 in 141 games.
Great fun. The social element can not be understated. I think Strat is more fun than playing any graphical alternative short of actual real physical baseball.
Maybe I'm a naive boy, but I solved this problem a long time ago: I don't use WiFi if I can avoid it.
I ran wire from a gigabit switch to the places I normally use my laptop. My desktops (and my server, of course) are all on wire. Cheap, fast, reliable, and no interference.
Yes, I know that there are times when WiFi is pretty useful and practical (I was helping a person in #ubuntu on Freenode yesterday via my netbook on the kitchen counter while I was making breakfast, in fact) but if you don't use WiFi for anything critical, the lack of reliability will never be a deal breaker.
I don't know what this aversion to wire is. It reminds me of the time when my sister-in-law was on the phone with my wife, and the call ended suddenly. Nothing, nothing, nothing, and no answer when my wife called her back. About half an hour later, my sister-in-law called back to say that the power had failed. Yes, cordless phones do die when the power fails, but what sane person doesn't have at least one wired phone to use in an emergency? The answer is - a lot of people don't. I guess not everyone thinks like I do.
Agreed. The logical followthrough is to use a large laptop because that would be more manly... and that defeats the purpose.
White may not be the most manly colour (my Aspire One is deep blue) but the size is the issue to me. Unless it's pink I don't think it really matters. (Women can have pink machines if they want, but it would seem weird to me for a man to use one.)
My AA1 is cute. I embrace it. It's the laptop that's so tiny I take it everywhere, in my manpurse. I mean my laptop bag. Of course. Yep.
Or Saskatchewan. We don't do DST either.
Actually, a good solution is to just be on DST all-year long. Portions of Saskatchewan have done exactly that. Astronomically where I live should be MST/MDT. (The sun is at its zenith at 12:57 pm and it should be there at 12:00.) This way a person gets more sunlight later in the day in the summer, and the days in winter are short enough that it doesn't really matter anyway.
Stop driving, now. Seriously. If you are employed in a given Canadian province, your driver's license ceases to become valid between 30 and 90 days after you arrive. (This applies even if you move from another Canadian province.) If you do not have a valid license, you do not have insurance which means you will pay for all damages caused (which, in a serious collision, are not hard to get into five and six figures). It's not worth the risk.
(I'm in the insurance business in Saskatchewan, so I know this stuff first-hand.)
Tickets are the least of your concern.
+1 insightful. This is a really interesting point. I'd love to see this brought up in a court of law. I agree with you that using "borrowed" WiFi is not at all passive.
Slightly tangentially, my personal opinion has always been that you are using the public airwaves with your access point, and that it is up to you to protect the broadcast. If you use an analog cordless phone, I am free to listen to your conversations because they are unencrypted. It is another matter entirely for me to decrypt encrypted traffic, whether it be voice or data.
Sounds like a terrific book. I find firewalling and routing to be one of the least intuitive parts of networking so this book might be a good purchase for me.
International roaming rate... a buck or two a minute? Anyone who can afford to yack on their phone at $60-120 an hour can afford to sit in business class, and I won't be in there so I won't care.:)
If someone in economy class talks on their phone for an hour, snicker to yourself about how horrible their bill is going to be.
The vast majority of people are going to talk on their phones for very short durations. "We're running late; pick me up at 11." I don't see the duration of calls being a problem at all.
Unless we ban people talking to the people beside them, allowing phone conversations is not making things that much worse. The only thing that's different is that you can't hear the other side of the conversation.
500 Wii points is only $5. If you can't find a Wii before the free download of Opera is gone, just pay the $5.
I bet lots of people would overpay for a Wii by a lot more than $5 to get one today. Luckily I didn't have to.
At the $2 a minute that the service will likely cost, you'll get the last laugh, knowing that the idiot beside you who talked to his girlfriend for two hours cost himself $240.
The solution to getting good performance out of old machines is to install RAM. It's that simple.
My desktops suck by today's standards. One's a PIII-450. The other is a PII-400. However, both run Ubuntu (and Windows XP, actually) very well. The reason: RAM. I have maxed both out. The PIII has 768 MB. The PII has 384 MB.
It is quite surprising to me sometimes how installing a little memory can make an old system sing. It often isn't very expensive, either.
Celestia supposedly needs an 800 MHz processor to run well, but I find it runs great on the PIII-450 because of all the memory (and the fastest video driver I could find). There is even enough horsepower left to do some IRC.:)
Buy RAM. I have always found that installing all the physical memory a system will handle will extend the useful lifespan of the computer immensely.
We can't see half of our own galaxy (the galaxy centre gets in the way). Goodness, there are galaxies in orbit around the Milky Way that we have just discovered in the last few years. To discover another civilization, we need to exist when they do, within sight (or at least with the ability to hear each other on radio), and actually be looking at the right time. It took me five years to meet my best friend's roommate, so the fact that these civilizations exist is only the beginning.
The difference here, of course, is that we have proven that pink unicorns (i.e. life in this case) already exist. The question is whether this is the only instance or not. That's completely different from asking the question where none have ever proven to exist at all.
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I'm a computer geek and I only use about 30 gigs a month (on a different provider). I don't really see what the problem is.
A friend works at a local ISP and he tells me that 0.1% of the customers use as much bandwidth as I do. That's a very tiny percentage.
If people want to use the Internet to download massive amounts of p2p content, do they really expect they should pay the same as Grandma who checks her email once a day? Bandwidth is a finite resource, even if we don't believe it.
Just remember that you can't get full speed on Bluetooth. Bluetooth is good up to about 2Mbps (going by memory, that might not be exact). The iPhone 3G is capable of 3.6 Mbps and the 3GS, 7.2 Mbps. You won't get full speed in the real world but I've gotten over 5 Mbps on a HSUPA data stick so you can certainly do better than Bluetooth can do.
Bluetooth is certainly more convenient, but there is a price for the convenience. Battery life is lower, too, since all that Bluetooth reception and transmission takes power. (And if you're on AC on your laptop, your iPhone will be happily charging away if you're on USB.)
Tethering isn't an Apple thing - it's an AT&T thing. I have an iPhone on Rogers in Canada and I can tether just fine. All you need with Rogers is a data plan giving 1 gigabyte or more and they include the feature at no extra cost.
The only time a manual transmission is boring or annoying is in gridlock. In traffic that is moving, or even better, on empty roads, manual transmissions change mindless, boring driving to a fun experience - at least for me.
The problem is that most people crank their defroster to maximum fan speed and that makes the engine take forever to warm up . The secret is to put the fan on a low speed (even 1) and don't be in the car for a minute or so (while you clear the windows), then ease it up to 2 and start going. Notch the fan up as you notice your temp gauge going up. Don't use maximum speed unless your engine is at full operating temperature. Even then, very small engines in very cold weather will lose heat at maximum fan speed unless they're actually driving (i.e. the engine is under load); idling at full fan speed may still result in the engine cooling off.
I start my engine, leave the fan on low, turn on my seat warmer, clear the windows, and by the time the windows are scraped, I drive. Drive gently and easily until the engine is warmer. That way I get heat quickly and I am friendlier to the environment.
If the interior of your car is really humid and you're getting frost inside on the windows, turn on the air conditioning. This will help to sublimate the ice faster. (Keep the heat turned to the warmest temperature, of course. It'll still warm up your car - but with air with less humidity in it, which helps to remove the frost and ice.)
I played World of Warcraft on dialup... last summer. I wanted to see if it could be done. It can. I'm sure it would annoy some. Walking around Stormwind is certainly painful, since there are always a lot of players around, but soloing is fine.
This is with v.90 at my cottage, and a connection rate (according to my lovely US Robotics Courier v.90 v.Everything modem) of about 45333 bps down, 33600 bps up.
You might ask why I tried it. The answer is that the latency of the EDGE cellular connection that I have there is absolutely painful (close to 500 ms at times compared to about 150-200 ms on v.90). Latency is more important than transfer rate for a lot of applications.
None of the other posters (that I've seen at least) have recommended that you upgrade the hard disk. You absolutely can. It will be some work but it will be worth it. A multi-gigabyte hard disk will make your system a lot more useful.
Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on /dev/hda3 2.2G 913M 1.2G 44% / /dev/hda1 89M 85M 0 100% /boot /dev/sda1 3.8G 1.8G 1.9G 49% /usr /dev/hdb1 1.4G 222M 1.1G 17% /var /dev/hdb2 1.6G 374M 1.2G 25% /home
That's from my 486sx25 with 32 MB of RAM. No X, though. And not a laptop.
Just remember that you need a /boot partition if your machine can't natively see large hard disks. My machine choked hard on the 2.2G IDE drive I put into it, so a 100-megabyte /boot solved the problem nicely.
Maximize the RAM. This will help too. Unfortunately 32 MB is the maximum mine will take. (In theory it might take more; there are larger 30-pin SIMMs than I'm using now, but my machine wasn't built for them, so I haven't bothered trying them. They might work but they would probably be a waste of money.)
This is a waste of time. Some wastes of time are still fun. If it entertains you to do this, do it. I keep my 486 running out of nostalgia only (it was my first *nix box).
Incidentally if you want some low-end box projects, check out http://www.lowendbox.com/wiki ... the author is really interested in very modest VPSes (sub-$5 a month for many) but the principles would apply to modest whole-computer systems too. I put lighttpd on my 486 out of inspiration from that wiki.
Three days to compile a 2.6.28 kernel last winter on my 486sx25 with 32 MB of RAM... (Yes I know I could have crosscompiled). But it does work.
Double density is what these drives used, and high density are easier to find. Is that what you meant?
Single density disks weren't that commonly used. The only reasonably common system I can think of that used them was the Atari 8-bit machines, and even then only if you had the original 810 5.25" disk drive. The later 1050 used double density disks (but could read and write single density disks with a lower capacity).
I was in a keeper league for ten years ('92-'01). It was a lot of fun. We played a 128-game season - 40 man rosters (25 active until "Declaration Day" which was around Game 100, equivalent to September 1 in the MLB schedule) after which you could use any of the 40 players. Of course, since we didn't have minor leagues a lot of the extra 15 players were prospects or players who had had bad seasons that we were keeping for the future.
I was the worst team in our league in the first season. I got into the playoffs for the first time in the fifth season and was in them every season afterwards. I won one league championship and lost in game seven of two other championships. We had ten teams at first, twelve for some of the years so I think I did respectably.
I still talk to some of the league members so the friendships built are real.
Lots of memories... probably the best was in game four of the World Series that I won. I was up two games to one but was losing by three in the ninth. With two out and two on, my centre fielder Ken Griffey Jr. hammered one over the wall to tie the game. I gave up a run in the twelfth and Griffey bailed me out again with a one-out solo shot. In the fourteenth with the score still tied, Griffey hit his third of the game, a walk-off solo shot for the win. Yes, this game is cards and dice, but that game was incredibly intense.
In 1,280 regular season games I had only one no-hitter. Ironically it was pitched by Roger Clemens, who never pitched one in real life. Our league never saw a perfect game and only saw about half a dozen no-hitters.
I had Mark McGwire the year he hit 70 home runs in real life and he hit 60 in 128 games and another ten in two playoff rounds for me to finish at 70 in 141 games.
Great fun. The social element can not be understated. I think Strat is more fun than playing any graphical alternative short of actual real physical baseball.
Maybe I'm a naive boy, but I solved this problem a long time ago: I don't use WiFi if I can avoid it.
I ran wire from a gigabit switch to the places I normally use my laptop. My desktops (and my server, of course) are all on wire. Cheap, fast, reliable, and no interference.
Yes, I know that there are times when WiFi is pretty useful and practical (I was helping a person in #ubuntu on Freenode yesterday via my netbook on the kitchen counter while I was making breakfast, in fact) but if you don't use WiFi for anything critical, the lack of reliability will never be a deal breaker.
I don't know what this aversion to wire is. It reminds me of the time when my sister-in-law was on the phone with my wife, and the call ended suddenly. Nothing, nothing, nothing, and no answer when my wife called her back. About half an hour later, my sister-in-law called back to say that the power had failed. Yes, cordless phones do die when the power fails, but what sane person doesn't have at least one wired phone to use in an emergency? The answer is - a lot of people don't. I guess not everyone thinks like I do.
Agreed. The logical followthrough is to use a large laptop because that would be more manly... and that defeats the purpose. White may not be the most manly colour (my Aspire One is deep blue) but the size is the issue to me. Unless it's pink I don't think it really matters. (Women can have pink machines if they want, but it would seem weird to me for a man to use one.) My AA1 is cute. I embrace it. It's the laptop that's so tiny I take it everywhere, in my manpurse. I mean my laptop bag. Of course. Yep.
Heavy metal stickers. Lots of them!
Or Saskatchewan. We don't do DST either. Actually, a good solution is to just be on DST all-year long. Portions of Saskatchewan have done exactly that. Astronomically where I live should be MST/MDT. (The sun is at its zenith at 12:57 pm and it should be there at 12:00.) This way a person gets more sunlight later in the day in the summer, and the days in winter are short enough that it doesn't really matter anyway.
Stop driving, now. Seriously. If you are employed in a given Canadian province, your driver's license ceases to become valid between 30 and 90 days after you arrive. (This applies even if you move from another Canadian province.) If you do not have a valid license, you do not have insurance which means you will pay for all damages caused (which, in a serious collision, are not hard to get into five and six figures). It's not worth the risk. (I'm in the insurance business in Saskatchewan, so I know this stuff first-hand.) Tickets are the least of your concern.
+1 insightful. This is a really interesting point. I'd love to see this brought up in a court of law. I agree with you that using "borrowed" WiFi is not at all passive. Slightly tangentially, my personal opinion has always been that you are using the public airwaves with your access point, and that it is up to you to protect the broadcast. If you use an analog cordless phone, I am free to listen to your conversations because they are unencrypted. It is another matter entirely for me to decrypt encrypted traffic, whether it be voice or data.
Sounds like a terrific book. I find firewalling and routing to be one of the least intuitive parts of networking so this book might be a good purchase for me.
International roaming rate... a buck or two a minute? Anyone who can afford to yack on their phone at $60-120 an hour can afford to sit in business class, and I won't be in there so I won't care. :)
If someone in economy class talks on their phone for an hour, snicker to yourself about how horrible their bill is going to be.
The vast majority of people are going to talk on their phones for very short durations. "We're running late; pick me up at 11." I don't see the duration of calls being a problem at all.
Unless we ban people talking to the people beside them, allowing phone conversations is not making things that much worse. The only thing that's different is that you can't hear the other side of the conversation.
500 Wii points is only $5. If you can't find a Wii before the free download of Opera is gone, just pay the $5. I bet lots of people would overpay for a Wii by a lot more than $5 to get one today. Luckily I didn't have to.
At the $2 a minute that the service will likely cost, you'll get the last laugh, knowing that the idiot beside you who talked to his girlfriend for two hours cost himself $240.
The solution to getting good performance out of old machines is to install RAM. It's that simple. My desktops suck by today's standards. One's a PIII-450. The other is a PII-400. However, both run Ubuntu (and Windows XP, actually) very well. The reason: RAM. I have maxed both out. The PIII has 768 MB. The PII has 384 MB. It is quite surprising to me sometimes how installing a little memory can make an old system sing. It often isn't very expensive, either. Celestia supposedly needs an 800 MHz processor to run well, but I find it runs great on the PIII-450 because of all the memory (and the fastest video driver I could find). There is even enough horsepower left to do some IRC. :)
Buy RAM. I have always found that installing all the physical memory a system will handle will extend the useful lifespan of the computer immensely.
Sorry to break it to you, but most of Canada observes DST too. But not us here in Saskatchewan. Too bad I don't still use NT or 2000. :)
If local retailers won't sell me the products I want to buy, I'm more than happy to mail order them. I agree that MCC media is extremely good, though.
We can't see half of our own galaxy (the galaxy centre gets in the way). Goodness, there are galaxies in orbit around the Milky Way that we have just discovered in the last few years. To discover another civilization, we need to exist when they do, within sight (or at least with the ability to hear each other on radio), and actually be looking at the right time. It took me five years to meet my best friend's roommate, so the fact that these civilizations exist is only the beginning.
The difference here, of course, is that we have proven that pink unicorns (i.e. life in this case) already exist. The question is whether this is the only instance or not. That's completely different from asking the question where none have ever proven to exist at all.