Things change. It may be that you have seen analog technology all your life and so you see something disappear that "has always been there and should forever be there", but probably your father has seen 8track coming up, and your grandfather saw 35mm come into existance. Now you see both of them (practically) go extinct. But this is how progress is made.
Try to go shopping for a super8 filmcamera. Or a vinyl recordplayer for use in the home. They have been replaced by new products.
New products are not always better in all aspects, especially as the focus has shifted from "providing good quality to our customers" to "making as much money as possible and securing that others cannot do the same". But that is the economic model that many inhabitants of the western world seem to prefer. Then do not whine about it.
At least over here, it is. There is "Long Wave", "Medium Wave" and "Short Wave" and (for broadcast radio) they all use AM modulation. (although that is changing)
So, while Americans call "Medium Wave" AM that is not a good specification of what you mean.
Just like CDMA is not a phone system. CDMA is used by GPS satellites as well.
This is what you get for equating technical modulation name standards with local phone standard names. Probably you mixup AM with Medium Wave as well?
I was only referring to a CDMA system (Code Division Multiple Access), not to a standard of the same name that uses that technology. CDMA is known to be superior (relative to narrowband standards) when it comes to multipath and interference. Depending on the implementation, it could also be friendlier w.r.t. EMC. (the TDMA system used by GSM is known by everyone who has been standing too close to audio equipment with bad EMC properties)
Yahoo has the tendency to keep pages returning a 404 error in their index. I don't know if they count these stale pages in their total, but I would not be surprised.
Long after having changed a website structure, Yahoo keeps coming back to old URLs that return a 404 every time. A few weeks later it just tries again. Google is apparently more clever when handling this situation.
The only thing worse than Yahoo is the French "Voila.fr" search engine. It keeps fetching pages that have not been valid for many years, and is not intimidated by 301, 302, 404 or robot exclusion. Pages excluded via robots.txt are no longer fetched, but when you remove the line from robots.txt after a year, it immediately starts fetching again. So they have not been removed from the index at all.
It was the same when GSM was run in parallel with NMT. GSM had the advantage of international roaming and was focussing more on the businessman type of client. NMT was sold to schoolchildren under the brandname "Hi!".
And now? NMT is dead and forgotten and GSM is cheap.
The disadvantage for UMTS now is that the licenses were sold at the highpoint of the.COM bubble and too much was paid for them. This somehow has to be recouped.
Actually they were ahead of their time. That is not always good, though. In Europe the GSM system is gradually going to be replaced by a CDMA system as well. Only they call it UMTS.
Here in the Netherlands I got a phone for like 20 dollars about 4 years ago. I got some free minutes with it. I still have it. I don't pay a monthly charge. Just pre-pay an amount of money (like 10 dollars) and I get a number of call minutes to use up. As long as I keep a positive balance others can call me without it costing a dime. In all that time I have put maybe 50 dollars worth of calling minutes into it.
There is not even a time limit to use up the minutes, as long as you make at least one call a year. (and they do that only to be able to release the number when the phone has somehow been lost or is defective)
I should say that in addition to the hundreds of spam delivery attempts via hacked Windows systems we filter weekly, last week I have seen TWO deliveries of "your eBay account has been suspended" scams that we sent via cracked Linux boxes.
For a long time I have forwarded all 419 scams to abuse addresses at all their involved mailbox hosters. In some cases (not always, unfortunately) this causes them to lose their account and thus their way to get replies and possible revenue.
What I would have liked is that they detected "when we send mail to this address we lose our account" and put that address on some blacklist to send no more scams.
But, this has not happened. So, I don't think there is any cleverness behind it, they just scatterbomb and hope the don't hit a whistleblower.
Apparently it has been removed in 2.6 In 2.4 it was part of the standard source but of course it usually was not enabled in.config. Maybe they considered the audience too small...
But anyway, it is available for Linux.
In my own system I use a HDLC interface card that is driven by drivers/net/hamradio/scc.c and has external hardware modems, this was a solution popular between the TNC and the softwaremodem era. This driver is still in the 2.6 kernel, together with some others. It scales a bit better because it is usually impractical to have many soundcards in one system.
Using these cards a typical 386 PC from those days could drive 12 modems at speeds between 1200 and 9600 bps, and this setup was used in connecting nodes (routers) in the amateur packet radio network.
The network has mostly died, because its users have moved on to the Internet (which was not available to the general public when this network was first built, back in the mid eighties). Now, packet radio is more an individual-station affair again, with applications like satellite/iss contacts, APRS (broadcasting GPS-determined position and other info), etc.
As ThinkingGuy wrote, that part is called soundmodem. It is also in the standard kernel. You need the AX.25 protocol as well.
When you have enabled the AX.25 protocol and the soundmodem, you can use various user-mode programs to display what you are receiving. In SuSE Linux, which I use, there are packages like ax25-tools and ax25-utils.
It is actually a very good idea! Why? Because it is so simple. It can hardly fail. Try it yourself with a 50cm (20 inch) piece, you will see it always rightens itself no matter how you hit it. Under wightless conditions, any length reasonable for an antenna will behave the same, and still can be packed in a small space.
Compare that to an automatically extending car antenna. It is complicated, uses a lot of current, and can get stuck anytime.
A TNC is completely superfluous. It is a technology developed over 20 years ago, at the time the typical radio amateur would have only a terminal or a very simple computer, and computers existed in very many variants so software development on home computers was a nightmare. To make packet work, someone developed a small embedded system with modem and firmware running the protocol, and connected it to a serial port of a computer that would only be a terminal.
However, with the current state of the art you don't need that. A modem can easily be emulated in the PC itself, so you just feed the audio from the receiver to the soundcard of your PC, and in the PC you install software that performs the functions of the modem and the microcontroller originally in the TNC.
Even in Linux this service is available, as part of the standard kernel. No need to spend any money on a TNC, it is outdated technology! (would you buy an external 1200 baud telephone modem today?)
When "the Gecko developers working on it" it will be quite some time before you see any of that work in Firefox. After all, all of last years work in Gecko is not in the current Firefox version either.
Remember that it will not be released for anything other than XP and Vista. Stats on the website at work (that are showing rarely any Linux or Mac users) show that this year 54.5% of visitors have been using Windows XP. That means that IE7, currently, cannot achieve more than 54.5% marketshare on this site, even when all XP users would upgrade. I wonder if any websites exist with more than 90% XP users.
Apparently you have not been on the web a couple of years ago, when it was very common for websites to show a "please upgrade to Internet Explorer 5" to visitors using Linux.
And even when you do not service its users, it does not mean that you lose your market share. If your site is worth visiting, people might be willing to make some effort to view it.
(just like some people are willing to install something like a JVM to view a site they really want to see)
So what you are saying is that the bank/corporate website developers are still walking on MS's leech and follow every change.
I'm not so sure. Some of them developed "for IE only" but what will they do when the next version of IE breaks their site? Develop "for IE7 only" and break it for everyone before Windows XP? Unlikely.
Or, develop "standards-compatible" and take some other users on board in the same move? That seems a better idea.
However, when IE7 is not standards compatible, there will probably still problems for its users. I don't think all corporations around the world will again dive into their website code to fix those problems. Either IE7 will have an IE6 mode, or it will have to render standard HTML/CSS properly.
I agree it is difficult to know what your bank will support and not support, but fortunately some banks have seen the light.
In the past, most if not all banks said "you have to use Windows, you have to install our package, or else no electronic banking". Then they switched to using Internet browsers, and the next credo was "you have to use Windows, you have to use IE, or else we will ban you from our site".
But, banks have started to make the switch. Now, some of them support open standards and write this in their brochures. Once this becomes a real competitive advantage, one can expect that other banks will follow. Or else you know who to switch to.
My experience is that dedicated routers usually have severe limitations in what you can do. It will not be important for many, but I have a complicated networking setup including several tunnels, some with IPsec and some without, and lots of iptables filter lines. There are two different routing tables with policy routing.
When your PC uses too much power (I would first make an actual measurement before reading the power supply rating as the power consumption, an often made mistake), you can always use a power efficient board and small powersupply. For example, a VIA EPIA mini-ITX board, or one of the Soekris boards.
QoS often is a collection of bits and pieces that does not (yet) form a complete string.
For example, the gaming application and/or the OS it is run on may (and probably will) lack the user interface to define a QoS level for the connections it uses. Then the router may implement QoS but it is of little use...
A generic traffic shaping function can overcome this problem.
Slashdot Mirror
Things change. It may be that you have seen analog technology all your life and so you see something disappear that "has always been there and should forever be there", but probably your father has seen 8track coming up, and your grandfather saw 35mm come into existance.
Now you see both of them (practically) go extinct. But this is how progress is made.
Try to go shopping for a super8 filmcamera. Or a vinyl recordplayer for use in the home.
They have been replaced by new products.
New products are not always better in all aspects, especially as the focus has shifted from "providing good quality to our customers" to "making as much money as possible and securing that others cannot do the same".
But that is the economic model that many inhabitants of the western world seem to prefer. Then do not whine about it.
At least over here, it is.
There is "Long Wave", "Medium Wave" and "Short Wave" and (for broadcast radio) they all use AM modulation. (although that is changing)
So, while Americans call "Medium Wave" AM that is not a good specification of what you mean.
Just like CDMA is not a phone system. CDMA is used by GPS satellites as well.
This is what you get for equating technical modulation name standards with local phone standard names.
Probably you mixup AM with Medium Wave as well?
I was only referring to a CDMA system (Code Division Multiple Access), not to a standard of the same name that uses that technology.
CDMA is known to be superior (relative to narrowband standards) when it comes to multipath and interference. Depending on the implementation, it could also be friendlier w.r.t. EMC.
(the TDMA system used by GSM is known by everyone who has been standing too close to audio equipment with bad EMC properties)
Yahoo has the tendency to keep pages returning a 404 error in their index.
I don't know if they count these stale pages in their total, but I would not be surprised.
Long after having changed a website structure, Yahoo keeps coming back to old URLs that return a 404 every time. A few weeks later it just tries again.
Google is apparently more clever when handling this situation.
The only thing worse than Yahoo is the French "Voila.fr" search engine. It keeps fetching pages that have not been valid for many years, and is not intimidated by 301, 302, 404 or robot exclusion.
Pages excluded via robots.txt are no longer fetched, but when you remove the line from robots.txt after a year, it immediately starts fetching again. So they have not been removed from the index at all.
It was the same when GSM was run in parallel with NMT.
.COM bubble and too much was paid for them. This somehow has to be recouped.
GSM had the advantage of international roaming and was focussing more on the businessman type of client.
NMT was sold to schoolchildren under the brandname "Hi!".
And now? NMT is dead and forgotten and GSM is cheap.
The disadvantage for UMTS now is that the licenses were sold at the highpoint of the
Actually they were ahead of their time. That is not always good, though.
In Europe the GSM system is gradually going to be replaced by a CDMA system as well. Only they call it UMTS.
Here in the Netherlands I got a phone for like 20 dollars about 4 years ago. I got some free minutes with it.
I still have it. I don't pay a monthly charge. Just pre-pay an amount of money (like 10 dollars) and I get a number of call minutes to use up. As long as I keep a positive balance others can call me without it costing a dime.
In all that time I have put maybe 50 dollars worth of calling minutes into it.
There is not even a time limit to use up the minutes, as long as you make at least one call a year.
(and they do that only to be able to release the number when the phone has somehow been lost or is defective)
we sent = were sent
I should say that in addition to the hundreds of spam delivery attempts via hacked Windows systems we filter weekly, last week I have seen TWO deliveries of "your eBay account has been suspended" scams that we sent via cracked Linux boxes.
Apparently this abuse is on the rise...
For a long time I have forwarded all 419 scams to abuse addresses at all their involved mailbox hosters.
In some cases (not always, unfortunately) this causes them to lose their account and thus their way to get replies and possible revenue.
What I would have liked is that they detected "when we send mail to this address we lose our account" and put that address on some blacklist to send no more scams.
But, this has not happened. So, I don't think there is any cleverness behind it, they just scatterbomb and hope the don't hit a whistleblower.
Apparently it has been removed in 2.6 .config.
In 2.4 it was part of the standard source but of course it usually was not enabled in
Maybe they considered the audience too small...
But anyway, it is available for Linux.
In my own system I use a HDLC interface card that is driven by drivers/net/hamradio/scc.c and has external hardware modems, this was a solution popular between the TNC and the softwaremodem era. This driver is still in the 2.6 kernel, together with some others.
It scales a bit better because it is usually impractical to have many soundcards in one system.
Using these cards a typical 386 PC from those days could drive 12 modems at speeds between 1200 and 9600 bps, and this setup was used in connecting nodes (routers) in the amateur packet radio network.
The network has mostly died, because its users have moved on to the Internet (which was not available to the general public when this network was first built, back in the mid eighties). Now, packet radio is more an individual-station affair again, with applications like satellite/iss contacts, APRS (broadcasting GPS-determined position and other info), etc.
As ThinkingGuy wrote, that part is called soundmodem. It is also in the standard kernel.
You need the AX.25 protocol as well.
When you have enabled the AX.25 protocol and the soundmodem, you can use various user-mode programs to display what you are receiving. In SuSE Linux, which I use, there are packages like ax25-tools and ax25-utils.
It is actually a very good idea!
Why? Because it is so simple. It can hardly fail.
Try it yourself with a 50cm (20 inch) piece, you will see it always rightens itself no matter how you hit it.
Under wightless conditions, any length reasonable for an antenna will behave the same, and still can be packed in a small space.
Compare that to an automatically extending car antenna. It is complicated, uses a lot of current, and can get stuck anytime.
A TNC is completely superfluous.
It is a technology developed over 20 years ago, at the time the typical radio amateur would have only a terminal or a very simple computer, and computers existed in very many variants so software development on home computers was a nightmare.
To make packet work, someone developed a small embedded system with modem and firmware running the protocol, and connected it to a serial port of a computer that would only be a terminal.
However, with the current state of the art you don't need that. A modem can easily be emulated in the PC itself, so you just feed the audio from the receiver to the soundcard of your PC, and in the PC you install software that performs the functions of the modem and the microcontroller originally in the TNC.
Even in Linux this service is available, as part of the standard kernel.
No need to spend any money on a TNC, it is outdated technology!
(would you buy an external 1200 baud telephone modem today?)
When "the Gecko developers working on it" it will be quite some time before you see any of that work in Firefox.
After all, all of last years work in Gecko is not in the current Firefox version either.
Remember that it will not be released for anything other than XP and Vista. Stats on the website at work (that are showing rarely any Linux or Mac users) show that this year 54.5% of visitors have been using Windows XP. That means that IE7, currently, cannot achieve more than 54.5% marketshare on this site, even when all XP users would upgrade.
I wonder if any websites exist with more than 90% XP users.
Apparently you have not been on the web a couple of years ago, when it was very common for websites to show a "please upgrade to Internet Explorer 5" to visitors using Linux.
IE7 will never achieve 90% market share!
And even when you do not service its users, it does not mean that you lose your market share. If your site is worth visiting, people might be willing to make some effort to view it.
(just like some people are willing to install something like a JVM to view a site they really want to see)
So what you are saying is that the bank/corporate website developers are still walking on MS's leech and follow every change.
I'm not so sure. Some of them developed "for IE only" but what will they do when the next version of IE breaks their site?
Develop "for IE7 only" and break it for everyone before Windows XP? Unlikely.
Or, develop "standards-compatible" and take some other users on board in the same move? That seems a better idea.
However, when IE7 is not standards compatible, there will probably still problems for its users. I don't think all corporations around the world will again dive into their website code to fix those problems. Either IE7 will have an IE6 mode, or it will have to render standard HTML/CSS properly.
Put a "best viewed with a standards-compatible browser" on your site and make sure no workarounds are enabled for IE7?
I agree it is difficult to know what your bank will support and not support, but fortunately some banks have seen the light.
In the past, most if not all banks said "you have to use Windows, you have to install our package, or else no electronic banking".
Then they switched to using Internet browsers, and the next credo was "you have to use Windows, you have to use IE, or else we will ban you from our site".
But, banks have started to make the switch. Now, some of them support open standards and write this in their brochures. Once this becomes a real competitive advantage, one can expect that other banks will follow. Or else you know who to switch to.
Unfortunately, MSIE brags that it accepts */*.
At least your parser would have to disregard such blatantly false claims...
You are barking up the wrong tree!
/. will not bring you anything; we already know it.
You should send such messages to your bank, or find a bank without such an incompetent IT department.
Telling us the above at
My experience is that dedicated routers usually have severe limitations in what you can do.
It will not be important for many, but I have a complicated networking setup including several tunnels, some with IPsec and some without, and lots of iptables filter lines. There are two different routing tables with policy routing.
When your PC uses too much power (I would first make an actual measurement before reading the power supply rating as the power consumption, an often made mistake), you can always use a power efficient board and small powersupply.
For example, a VIA EPIA mini-ITX board, or one of the Soekris boards.
QoS often is a collection of bits and pieces that does not (yet) form a complete string.
For example, the gaming application and/or the OS it is run on may (and probably will) lack the user interface to define a QoS level for the connections it uses.
Then the router may implement QoS but it is of little use...
A generic traffic shaping function can overcome this problem.