Zathras' Great Machine

yea - but how many scratches b on da discs? and are the discs what they say they are?

Don't throw an electrical outlet at me for sayin' that! Remember, at least I haven't talked about da "A" girl 2day . . .

"I didn't have the patience to download it all myself, so I bought a copy on eBay for a few dollars."

Some day, I too shall have the financial power to spend money rather than be patient. Hell, some day I might not be sitting here wondering whether I can afford to keep DSL long enough to patiently download five CDs worth of anything...lol

DSL STILL takes a friggin' long time to d/l anything. It sometimes goooes soooo slow. $!#!#! only 40kb/sec for last program d/l'ed

"$!#!#! only 40kb/sec for last program d/l'ed"

Wow -- that really is a painful speed... What kind of speeds do you get if you go to
http://www.dslreports.com/
?

I'd check mine, but I'm grabbing a "really big file" *cough* off KazaaLite, so my bandwidth is pretty maxed right now!

The thing is it keeps going from medium-high to just plain out lower than low.

I was trying to download from a certain download dot com site just a few minutes ago - they wanted me to use their "new and improved dowload program. It will make your downloads quicker! Faster!" - so, after I downloaded it, it told me I had a 3 day wait on getting my program :/

Ok - let's have a drag race.

http://www.cnet.com/
Bandwidth Meter
1003 Kbps

Not bad, not too good either. Prob. both of yours (and prob. Parrash's at work) are much faster.

Actually, our DSL connection at work averages only about 400 Kbps. Not particularly impressive, especially for a corporate environment.

My speed at home varies, since it's a cable modem, but it's typically *much* faster than that... probably, on average, closer to 1.5 Mbps or perhaps even higher than that.

Yea - a few folks told me that DSL was better than cable, then others said cable's better than DSL . . . $#!@# Kinda had to find out for myself.

So here's my question, as I haven't quite figured it out... How are the results of the CNet/DSLReports tests related to actual top download speeds? I know that the two appear almost totally unrelated for me. :^P

(My ISP is having trouble, so the results at CNet and DSLReports are way below what they usually are. I normally get a 1.3mbps result, but last night & this morning only clocked in at 845kbps.)

"Yea - a few folks told me that DSL was better than cable, then others said cable's better than DSL . . . $#!@# Kinda had to find out for myself."

I think it depends on where you live at. Here in subrural Northern California, DSL outpaces cable by about 300kbps on a slow day. I did a speed test one day while on @home and discovered that my 56k dialup connection was only a split second slower in loading graphic-intensive websites! DSL is also completely reliable here, while cable was constantly (as in "almost every day") vanishing for minutes to hours without warning.

I'll be honest, I don't know how Parrish stands being with an ISP that drops his connection for *weeks* at a time. I'd go completely stark raving nuts if I couldn't go online at night after school/work/whatever -- that's the only way I really socialize!

I got 1295Kb at 5pm, but I am on the east coast, and have to compete for bandwidth with the whole country. My cable modem peaks out around 300KB, or 2400Kb for local servers. Real download speeds can be anywhere from 5 to 300KB, averaging around 100 or so. dslreports.com is a bit more accurate - 1984Kb down, 346 up, which was rated as 'insane, dude!' :)

About Linux - either dual boot, or set up separate machines while you are learning. It took me over a year of consistent work to become familiar with the Unix mind set. Once you learn shell programming and Perl, the flexibility will make windows seem like a straight jacket.

I'd also advise getting a bunch of books - I had 6 or 7 while I was learning. No one book has everything, or even most of the stuff in Linux. One very good book is "Linux Administration Handbook" by Nemeth, Snyder, Hein, et al. http://www.admin.com
Anything by O'Reilly is usually decent too.

I bow to all your superior speeds.

dslreports.com told me:

2003-05-22 20:11:48 EST: 184 / 1
Your download speed : 184983 bps, or 184 kbps.
A 22.5 KB/sec transfer rate.
Your upload speed : 1325 bps, or 1 kbps.

I'm just glad to be online.

I'm hoping that the technology I need develops and becomes affordable over the next five years or so because I'm planning to move out to the middle of nowhere and it would be really nice to be able to put a dish on my roof and stay online. I'm certainly not paying to have phone lines wired all the way out to nowhere just to go back to a regular landline modem.

I'm pissed off the way the fast technology is STILL not accessible to everyone. We should be all having 10,000kps and people should be able to get it ANYWHERE, ANYTIME. Instead we're all drivin' friggin' Le Cars on the mutha friggin' Autobahn of technology. Shiiieeet.

"I'm pissed off the way the fast technology is STILL not accessible to everyone."

Well, on a technical level, anyone that can get to a public library where I live has access. I'm surprised your city library isn't the same.

On the other hand, CA is also about to begin *charging* to check out books from the so-called free public libraries, starting with $5 per interlibrary loan (per book, not per shipment), $1 for every book checked out other than from one's own city library, and then it's a short step to charging for all loans. Given how few books some libraries have, they might as well, because we're stuck doing interlibrary loans anyway.

If it was merely to recover the cost of transporting books, it'd be cool with me. $5 per book when it's one in a mass shipment of a few hundred titles being moved 20 miles in a truck, though? That's a bit overboard imho.

Not every library - that and most libraries have filters that are ultra-sensitive so you can't research things like "breast cancer, 'cuz "breast" is a dirty word - just things like that. The library in my town has DIAL UP, btw.

Libraries across the country are doin' that - esp. now that none of them have books in one location. Most of them are stockin' up on 7-11 romance novel stuff instead of any real lit.

My ex-gf, who's a librarian-in-training (aka the "A" girl) wrote a piece of interesting critism about the way libraries are today ("children's rooms" being located in dusty closets), but I can't share any of it here 'cuz she's not talkin' to me no mo'. Y'can prob. read it wherever they're publishin' it...

"Not every library - that and most libraries have filters that are ultra-sensitive so you can't research things like "breast cancer, 'cuz "breast" is a dirty word - just things like that. The library in my town has DIAL UP, btw."

Yikes... I had heard of that kind of situation in libraries but never talked to someone in it. Ours has had WWW at T1 (I believe) speeds for a few years, and had Telnet open back in '92 that I used to dial into from home to go MUDding as a teen. They don't even run censorship software on the kiddie workstations (see namelink) -- then again, it'd be hypocritical to have censorship software in an area known for having nudists at televised foot marathons...

"I can't share any of it here 'cuz she's not talkin' to me no mo'."

Which is, imho, entirely her loss. :^)

Jeez - the west coast is crazy. No censor software on the kiddie machines? My friend Josh once told me a story about when he was a 5th grade teacher and he had to unplug a computer right before it downloaded porn; one of the students clicked on a, uh, "wrong link," so to speak. When he unplugged the computer, some sort of surge happened where it fried the motherboard. One expensive "wrong link"

"Which is, imho, entirely her loss. :^)"

Thanks! That really cheers me up - esp. considering how bad the situation was/is.

Matt, thanks for the tips on Linux. Yes, I was planning to go dual boot for the time being. I'll also look into the books you recommended, but probably not until after I finish my MCSA. I want to stay on top of that for right now.

Shaw, you said you weren't going to talk about woman anymore, remember... :-) Although I will say that I agree with what Denise said. Most women could do a lot worse than you. In fact, most women *do*.

"Shaw, you said you weren't going to talk about woman anymore, remember... :-)"

You mean THAT woman. Yea, well, I've tried, and tried. I'm still gettin' it outta my system. Think of it sorta like an exorcism.

"Most women could do a lot worse than you. In fact, most women *do*."

She gave me a fun story about how, her ex-boyfriend, the father of her child, didn't want to be a father. He wanted to be a "rock star". So, he left her. Nice, huh?

Of course, that's only 1/20th of the story. Wait 'til you read the rest of it . . .

However, of course, that's the "story". Whether or not anything is true is beyond me . . .

"Jeez - the west coast is crazy. No censor software on the kiddie machines?"

Censor software is notorious for not working. For example, I know of an adult site that is on the same domain as a site that History Channel lists as valuable. Most censor software refuses to put that domain in their info so that kids can get to the history site but that means they can also get to the sex-and-satan site as well.

Librarians are notorious for defending free speech with the last drop of blood in their veins.

Wellll - SOME are...