the satellite providers charge way too much, for a crappy service.. some even have download limitations that decrease your service to dialup speeds if you overflow your quota bucket.. that's after you spend a couple hundred in equipment, and probably around $100 a month for a business connection... but I did do the math, and we lose a maximum of a 1000 hours every year in productivity due to waiting for pages to load, uploading high res images for products, and the bulk submission of hundreds of ebay items...
Satellite surely can't be as bad as dial-up, and as others have pointed out, the business really isn't viable if $100 a month for a decent connection is too expensive.
If you've done the maths right then this connection is costing your boss X thousand dollars per year, where X is your hourly rate. If you're only getting paid $5 an hour then that's $5000 a year or $416 per month. Buying a satellite connection would easily pay for itself, and since 1000 hours a year is 83 hours a month it would allow your boss to sack 1/2 an employee.... erm... I mean, expand his business.
If you show these figures to your boss and he doesn't do something about improving the connection to his office then he's not a very good businessman and doesn't deserve to stay in business. If he doesn't improve the connection then I'd advise you to consider quitting - it can't be much fun working on dial-up like this, and the guy's obvious incompetence is giving you no job-security.
Many thanks for that info, it's something I've been looking for for a looong time.
A pleasure.:D
BTW, I went to your web site and got the following error:
Warning: main(./pm/inc.sfx.inc): failed to open stream:
I am particularly interested in your site as I am doing some work with wireless and Ubuntu Linux.
Oooops.
* blushes *
Yup, I do know about that, and I'm sorry for not fixing it sooner.
Basically, I'm not a web-designer, so it's not very "interesting" to fix, I have loads of other things to do right now, and Linux hardware isn't really my main business, more of just a hobby.
What that page would tell you is that I sell 54 Mbps, 802.11g wireless network cards featuring the Ralink 2500 and the prism54 chipsets, which are both VERY well supported with open-source drivers under Linux.
The Ralink 2500 cards are £29 + p&p, available in PCI & cardbus versions and are supported by the rt2500 driver (which is now shipped by many distros, including Ubuntu).
The prism54 wireless cards are £39 + p&p and available in PCI only but as well as operating as a normal wireless network card they'll also do "master mode". This allows a regular Linux PC to operate as a wireless base-station - not ad-hoc mode, but proper master-mode, FWIW. The prism54 driver has been part of the main 2.6 kernel tree for some time.
I'm based in the UK but can ship within the EU. Email me for more details.
There's one small problem I've run into at my job when we sell customers an XP Home license to get them off of Corp: you can't do a repair installation from Windows XP Pro to Home. That's a problem because most of the customers we deal with want to save money and don't want the Pro license, although the Pro license gives us the option to Repair, and therefore keep their files, settings, etc.
If I caught this in time, I'd just tell 'em to buy the Pro version. Here in the UK XP OEM Home is about £60 and OEM Professional about £80 or £90. Provided I was happy & confident (not a given) that repairing with the OEM Professional version of XP would work then I'd tell 'em to buy the Pro and that extra expense would be covered by time saved paying me to muck about with it.
But in situations like this, I think there's a lot to be said for a format & reinstall. Don't get me wrong - I think this can be a massive cop-out on many occasions, and I believe that lots of people do it too easily because it's easier than analysing and learning about a problem - but in a situation where I'm not sure how Windows will behave (am I sure that Pro will repair the particular pirate version of XP that they have?) then format-and-reinstall is a very proven solution.
On a system that's otherwise working fine, and has been for some time, then I'd rather spend an hour or 90 minutes removing malware or a virus, or fixing an "inexplicable" browser problem than doing a format-and-reinstall. But when I have to do a format-and-reinstall then it's a VERY straight-forward process - I back up everything on the hard-drive with a knoppix CD to my portable drive, copy the back-up to another machine, dd the drive with a few zeros so that the Windows install starts on a blank sheet, and let it get on with things. I charge this at three hours of my time, but I'd guess that I probably only spend two or two-and-a-half actually sitting at or waiting on the machine because I base this fixed price on being able to take it away and leave it running in the corner of my study for a couple of days. Thus the customer gets a "brand new" machine with all a fresh operating system, all the Windows updates, I reinstall any software disks they give me, drag & drop My Documents back into place (and explain how to search the "Old Stuff" folder I've copied back to their hard-drive from my portable disk), reimport their address book & emails; when I take the machine back I check their printer and broadband works and the customer is usually like "Wow! It's never been this fast before!!"
I'll say again that this isn't always the best way to resolve problems, but many users don't have innumerable programs installed on their machine, nor such a customised desktop or set of preferences that it'll take them long to get things back to a way they're comfortable with. Often there is so much crap installed by the OEM at the factory that users have never experienced a truly fresh install of XP before!!
This was the first thing I tried when a customer approached me with this problem. And it didn't work. Repeatedly.
I guess that "+5 informative" needs some "-1 overrated" side-salad, huh?
I'm pretty sure the reason it doesn't work is that the version of Windows supplied under the genuine advantage program is different from the version that my customer's nephew installed. I believe it was Windows XP Professional Corporate Edition that was installed, and I'd guess that the CD supplied by Microsoft when she clicked on the "Get Genuine" link was either OEM or retail (it was certainly Windows XP Professional, and was a hologrammed CD).
The way I fixed this was to do a "repair install" of Windows XP. This worked perfectly & retained all the user's settings and documents, although I was pretty nervous about doing it and a number of drivers did require reinstall. Honestly, if you're undertaking this, be prepared to back everything up with a Knoppix CD & a portable hard-drive and to do a format-reinstall if necessary.
...all the other lines are ultimately owned by BT and they don't sell wholesale unlimited lines to the other ISPs (nor do they reserve them for their own customers)..
That's utter rubbish.
Whilst all the lines are owned by BT, when they were privatised by Maggie Thatcher in the 1980s they were put under the supervision of OFTEL (now OFCOM, I think) which was given the job of ensuring that BT doesn't behave in a monopolistic manner. For this reason BT have to provide lines to ISPs on reasonable terms - in fact BT's wholesale division are required to treat other ISPs on equal terms with BT Retail (and sometimes maybe they even do!) - and ISPs are allowed to resell services through BT's lines on whatever terms they wish. BT may have the right to charge ISPs usage fees for using their backbone network (between the exchange and the ISP's offices), but since Local Loop Unbunding ("LLU") ISPs are no longer required to use BT's backbone, so cost may not be prohibitive, either.
FWIW I use Eclipse (referrer link) for my ADSL. I find them to be very good indeed and those of my customers who have followed my advice (all too few, alas!) have been pleased with them, too.
I pay £29.99 for Eclipse's most premium home service. I get 3.5meg down out of MaxDSL & 445k or whatever up.
I believe this to be a truly unlimited service, but don't know for sure. I surely hit the 50gig per month that the OP mentions, but maybe not 100gig.
If I have technical support problems, Eclipse are brilliant. Their staff are based in Exeter, I believe. My line started giving problems on a Sunday, I called them on a Monday morning and as soon as the girl took my user login she told me she could see that the line was dropping every few minutes, that it was surely a line problem and that she'd escalate to BT wholesale. 2 hours later I got a call to arrange the engineer's visit (it actually took 2 engineers' visits to resolve the problem, as the first one disconnected the ringers of the telephones on my extension lines, but I'm getting used to that). Contrast this with the typical phonecall to BT's or Tiscali's tech support, where the call-handlers barely speak English and always ask you to reinstall the modem drivers. In fact, before now I've had to pretend to reinstall the modem drivers in order to get the PPPoA username & password to install a router, because the call handler didn't understand me when I asked for them (in however many different ways!) but was capable of reciting her script to the point where she could tell me "now type in user123@hg54.btinternet.com and fidothedog1".
Eclipse technical support managed to talk Mary, the 30-something, god-squad single-mother of 3, how to set up her own choice of email address through their web-based interface, AND THEN how to access it with Outlook Express. They must truly be saints, and deserve your business.
I'm not convinced by your statement that "pretty much any wifi card is supported now", as I certainly wasn't aware that the Broadcom driver was usable, but you missed out the Ralink 2500 chipset, which is very common in cheaper PCI & cardbus cards, as well as those by Belkin.
As identity0 pointed out in an adjacent post, Ralink released their own drivers for this chipset under the GPL, although I believe this has been thoroughly re-worked for the current community releases. This driver is shipped by a lot of distros now, and cards using it will probably be detected at install time by Suse, Ubuntu, Mandrake & Fedora Core. I find it very stable.
Well, this ain't the place to debug your particular issues, but AR5212 is the name of one of the the Atheros wi-fi chipsets which is used by many of the cards supported by the madwifi & madwifi-ng drivers. I can only assume yours is the one reported by others to "work flawlessly with MadWiFi drivers... well with WPA2 (wpa_supplicant)". The madwifi-ng drivers are indeed in a state of heavy development at the moment but I find it hard to believe that none of the daily snapshots will work with your card - and if they don't, have you tried reporting it to the developers?
If your experience is based on a single card then I think it's a shame you got modded to "+5 informative" when many other people seem to be using it successfully.
Oh, I should probably add to this that I use an Atheros card - specifically the Allnet ALL0281 - as a base-station and have had no problems with the kind of flakiness (random resets) that you mention. You mileage (or card or vendor) may vary.
I sell Linux compatible wireless cards and have had the pleasure of testing the Atheros, Ralink 2500 & prism54 chipsets. I think it was the acx100 chipset with which I had no luck at all.
Whilst Ralink & prism54 cards work great under Linux, the madwifi drivers for Atheros are not bad at all. They are under really heavy development at the moment, so I do expect some glitches - I found that one version of the CVS snapshot worked perfectly for me, whilst the next week's failed completely - but madwifi has some killer features which are quite a bonus if you can use them. I guess it's the open-drivers & these features that made PC Engines choose atheros cards as standard options for their embedded PC boards which they pitch as a "Wireless Router Application Platform".
Specifically with madwifi-ng you can use an Atheros card in master mode, have your PC as a base-station, and you can have multiple virtual access-points (VAPs), each assigned a different interface. Thus you can have trusted clients connecting via WEP to one VAP and allow open-access for unencrypted access to another VAP (using a single wireless card), but firewall the second VAP using iptables so that clients using it can only access the internet and not the LAN. Finally, madwifi also supports 802.11a as well as b&g with appropriate hardware (and there are a few cards out there that do a/b/g); I guess that not many people need this feature, but I can see it would be useful if there's a lot of b/g/cordless-phone interference in your area &/or if you just want a point-to-point link for connecting two office LANs and you'd prefer it to be a little off the radar.
Ralink's rt2500 might be a better chipset for someone who is coming from Windows and who just wants to install Ubuntu, but I wish I could get more of the Atheros cards (at the right price). If you're prepared to compile your own drivers & tinker a little bit to get it working then Atheros is surely the best wireless chipset for Linux available right now.
Bah! They cut some of the best bits of my submission!
The price of $300 seems a bit steep right now to a casual player like me, but this bit from the site's FAQ I find very appealing:
Buildings and landscapes are now massively destructible with extreme explosions of thousands of shards of glass and shrapnel that cause collateral damage
There's a comparison video showing the difference between Tom Clancy's Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighterwith & without the PhysX installed and a couple of hi-resvideos that are available by FTP, so can't be cached by Coral, I don't think.
What I really have to wonder, if this thing is as good as they reckon, is why I haven't heard of it before?
Note the odd claim in the Wikipedia article about.cat:
ICANN has expressly prohibited the use of the.cat domain for pages about cats, unless they are written in Catalan or concerning Catalan culture.
No, apparently they've prohibited the use of the.cat domain for pages about ANYTHING unless they are written in Catalan or concerning Catalan culture.
unlike [.com or.org],.cat has a more restricted personality as it is addressed to the Catalan linguistic and cultural community in the Internet. And Fundació puntCAT has an ICANN's contractual duty to verify that all domains are related to this community.
The website goes on to explain how you don't need to write in Catalan to get a.cat domain but that if you do, no other checks will be required. Presumably if you don't write in Catalan then they'll phone up your Mom & ask if you've ever been to Andorra, but I stopped reading after I realised I wouldn't be allowed wet-pussy.cat
Unfortunately the sunrise period (until the 21st April, I think) has three stages and the last one is for any one of 68,000 people who supported the establishment of the domain (I guess those who signed a petition, or something).
Cool.cat may well have gone by April the 22nd, but on that morning I guess you might want to try:
$ for foo in `grep -h cat$/usr/share/dict/words` ; do whois "${foo%cat}.cat" ; done | grep "NOT FOUND"
I don't know quite why PC Doctor is getting so upset about this. I briefly checked out the Sky by Broadband info a week or two ago, and from a few minutes clicking around the linked site it was perfectly plain to me that it involved installing the Kontiki P2P app. Ok, they may not shout it from the front page, but they're not exactly hiding the fact, either.
It may be perfectly clear to you, but it probably isn't perfectly clear to Joe Sixpack, Sky's main & target audience. Joe Sixpack just sees "great, a way to watch movies that I'd otherwise miss because I'm at work, and junior can watch them on the PC in his bedroom".
Slashdot Mirror
If you've done the maths right then this connection is costing your boss X thousand dollars per year, where X is your hourly rate. If you're only getting paid $5 an hour then that's $5000 a year or $416 per month. Buying a satellite connection would easily pay for itself, and since 1000 hours a year is 83 hours a month it would allow your boss to sack 1/2 an employee.... erm... I mean, expand his business.
If you show these figures to your boss and he doesn't do something about improving the connection to his office then he's not a very good businessman and doesn't deserve to stay in business. If he doesn't improve the connection then I'd advise you to consider quitting - it can't be much fun working on dial-up like this, and the guy's obvious incompetence is giving you no job-security.
Stroller.
* blushes *
Yup, I do know about that, and I'm sorry for not fixing it sooner.
Basically, I'm not a web-designer, so it's not very "interesting" to fix, I have loads of other things to do right now, and Linux hardware isn't really my main business, more of just a hobby.
What that page would tell you is that I sell 54 Mbps, 802.11g wireless network cards featuring the Ralink 2500 and the prism54 chipsets, which are both VERY well supported with open-source drivers under Linux.
The Ralink 2500 cards are £29 + p&p, available in PCI & cardbus versions and are supported by the rt2500 driver (which is now shipped by many distros, including Ubuntu).
The prism54 wireless cards are £39 + p&p and available in PCI only but as well as operating as a normal wireless network card they'll also do "master mode". This allows a regular Linux PC to operate as a wireless base-station - not ad-hoc mode, but proper master-mode, FWIW. The prism54 driver has been part of the main 2.6 kernel tree for some time.
I'm based in the UK but can ship within the EU. Email me for more details.
Ned.
But in situations like this, I think there's a lot to be said for a format & reinstall. Don't get me wrong - I think this can be a massive cop-out on many occasions, and I believe that lots of people do it too easily because it's easier than analysing and learning about a problem - but in a situation where I'm not sure how Windows will behave (am I sure that Pro will repair the particular pirate version of XP that they have?) then format-and-reinstall is a very proven solution.
On a system that's otherwise working fine, and has been for some time, then I'd rather spend an hour or 90 minutes removing malware or a virus, or fixing an "inexplicable" browser problem than doing a format-and-reinstall. But when I have to do a format-and-reinstall then it's a VERY straight-forward process - I back up everything on the hard-drive with a knoppix CD to my portable drive, copy the back-up to another machine, dd the drive with a few zeros so that the Windows install starts on a blank sheet, and let it get on with things. I charge this at three hours of my time, but I'd guess that I probably only spend two or two-and-a-half actually sitting at or waiting on the machine because I base this fixed price on being able to take it away and leave it running in the corner of my study for a couple of days. Thus the customer gets a "brand new" machine with all a fresh operating system, all the Windows updates, I reinstall any software disks they give me, drag & drop My Documents back into place (and explain how to search the "Old Stuff" folder I've copied back to their hard-drive from my portable disk), reimport their address book & emails; when I take the machine back I check their printer and broadband works and the customer is usually like "Wow! It's never been this fast before!!"
I'll say again that this isn't always the best way to resolve problems, but many users don't have innumerable programs installed on their machine, nor such a customised desktop or set of preferences that it'll take them long to get things back to a way they're comfortable with. Often there is so much crap installed by the OEM at the factory that users have never experienced a truly fresh install of XP before!!
Ned.
I guess that "+5 informative" needs some "-1 overrated" side-salad, huh?
I'm pretty sure the reason it doesn't work is that the version of Windows supplied under the genuine advantage program is different from the version that my customer's nephew installed. I believe it was Windows XP Professional Corporate Edition that was installed, and I'd guess that the CD supplied by Microsoft when she clicked on the "Get Genuine" link was either OEM or retail (it was certainly Windows XP Professional, and was a hologrammed CD).
The way I fixed this was to do a "repair install" of Windows XP. This worked perfectly & retained all the user's settings and documents, although I was pretty nervous about doing it and a number of drivers did require reinstall. Honestly, if you're undertaking this, be prepared to back everything up with a Knoppix CD & a portable hard-drive and to do a format-reinstall if necessary.
Ned.
Whilst all the lines are owned by BT, when they were privatised by Maggie Thatcher in the 1980s they were put under the supervision of OFTEL (now OFCOM, I think) which was given the job of ensuring that BT doesn't behave in a monopolistic manner. For this reason BT have to provide lines to ISPs on reasonable terms - in fact BT's wholesale division are required to treat other ISPs on equal terms with BT Retail (and sometimes maybe they even do!) - and ISPs are allowed to resell services through BT's lines on whatever terms they wish. BT may have the right to charge ISPs usage fees for using their backbone network (between the exchange and the ISP's offices), but since Local Loop Unbunding ("LLU") ISPs are no longer required to use BT's backbone, so cost may not be prohibitive, either.
FWIW I use Eclipse (referrer link) for my ADSL. I find them to be very good indeed and those of my customers who have followed my advice (all too few, alas!) have been pleased with them, too.
Ned.
As identity0 pointed out in an adjacent post, Ralink released their own drivers for this chipset under the GPL, although I believe this has been thoroughly re-worked for the current community releases. This driver is shipped by a lot of distros now, and cards using it will probably be detected at install time by Suse, Ubuntu, Mandrake & Fedora Core. I find it very stable.
Ned.
If your experience is based on a single card then I think it's a shame you got modded to "+5 informative" when many other people seem to be using it successfully.
Ned.
Oh, I should probably add to this that I use an Atheros card - specifically the Allnet ALL0281 - as a base-station and have had no problems with the kind of flakiness (random resets) that you mention. You mileage (or card or vendor) may vary.
Whilst Ralink & prism54 cards work great under Linux, the madwifi drivers for Atheros are not bad at all. They are under really heavy development at the moment, so I do expect some glitches - I found that one version of the CVS snapshot worked perfectly for me, whilst the next week's failed completely - but madwifi has some killer features which are quite a bonus if you can use them. I guess it's the open-drivers & these features that made PC Engines choose atheros cards as standard options for their embedded PC boards which they pitch as a "Wireless Router Application Platform".
Specifically with madwifi-ng you can use an Atheros card in master mode, have your PC as a base-station, and you can have multiple virtual access-points (VAPs), each assigned a different interface. Thus you can have trusted clients connecting via WEP to one VAP and allow open-access for unencrypted access to another VAP (using a single wireless card), but firewall the second VAP using iptables so that clients using it can only access the internet and not the LAN. Finally, madwifi also supports 802.11a as well as b&g with appropriate hardware (and there are a few cards out there that do a/b/g); I guess that not many people need this feature, but I can see it would be useful if there's a lot of b/g/cordless-phone interference in your area &/or if you just want a point-to-point link for connecting two office LANs and you'd prefer it to be a little off the radar.
Ralink's rt2500 might be a better chipset for someone who is coming from Windows and who just wants to install Ubuntu, but I wish I could get more of the Atheros cards (at the right price). If you're prepared to compile your own drivers & tinker a little bit to get it working then Atheros is surely the best wireless chipset for Linux available right now.
Ned.
The price of $300 seems a bit steep right now to a casual player like me, but this bit from the site's FAQ I find very appealing:
The PPU seems to be available as a PCI card but is also available in off-the-shelf machines from Dell & Alienware.There's a comparison video showing the difference between Tom Clancy's Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighterwith & without the PhysX installed and a couple of hi-res videos that are available by FTP, so can't be cached by Coral, I don't think.
What I really have to wonder, if this thing is as good as they reckon, is why I haven't heard of it before?
From http://www.puntcat.cat/en_faq.html#p10
The website goes on to explain how you don't need to write in Catalan to get aUnfortunately the sunrise period (until the 21st April, I think) has three stages and the last one is for any one of 68,000 people who supported the establishment of the domain (I guess those who signed a petition, or something).
Cool.cat may well have gone by April the 22nd, but on that morning I guess you might want to try:
Meanwhile UK ISPs are introducing download limits as low as a couple of gig per month, and charging for excessive usage.