h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

{[B17]} Back but busy.
Cheers for Monday, Munchkin. Appreciate it, once again.
Phil, all went well, judging by your posts, so fingers crossed the results are favourable.
Everyone else, hope you are all well. Not had time to take Lil's VTour as yet.
Sea *Looks at her and shakes head, with slight smile on lips*, I'll speak to you later.

*Also curious about sea's escorts, but decides not to press the issue*

Montana, hope the presentation goes well. Gotta keep associates open minded and all that, I guess.

*Also curious about sea's escorts, but decides not to press the issue*

Montana, hope the presentation goes well. Gotta keep associates open minded and all that, I guess.

Not a problem B-17. As stated on Monday, I am always available to be bought beer

Sorry I wasn't there on monday guys but a prior arrangement was the reason. So how did it go for you in Reading B17? Did you manage to find out the info you needed?
And to let you know, I finished Babel-17 (the book) and thought it to be a mighty fine yarn that held the attention whilst not dumbing anything down.

Not to worry, Phil. There will be other times.
As to whether I accomplished anything, time will tell. Glad to hear you finished and enjoyed the book.

For anyone interested as to why sea is currently residing in chains, one way want to venture to her personal space for a brief explanation.

You have my sympathy, sea.

*Doesn't understand the US system for dealing with missing school...*


Oooh, I'm on ADSL, people! I've had to wait a couple of hours since I got back from school before my user details were activated at their end, but it's on now! Looks like BT have made an exception, Phil. By God, it's fast! h2g2 pages load like a snap! Only thing is that I'll hate the school computers even more.

Thanks for the advice Bald Bloke. I'm keeping my old modem on standby, just in case. Besides, my Freenetname e-mail (though few e-mails there will be, as I've told everyone to e-mail me at my new domain name) can only be collected using the FNN account, and the same goes for accessing the old .org.uk site.

There's plenty of time for things to go wrong yet Chris (not wishing to dampen your enthusiasm though ).
Welcome to the broadband revolution, I think I'll be leaving it for a while before I get there at home - I mean I've bandwidth on tap at work so why bother

Mmm...the next step up for us is a T1 or T3 line.
But that'll be in, ooh, maybe a few decades or so.

I'm quite sure they'll be faults along the line, in the knowledge that it's BT I'm dealing with here.

*tips new cowboy hat to Phil for his explanation of tracert data*

Welcome to broadband, Chris. Ain't it great? I think I'm going to have to spring for satellite access when I go out west, because I now find the dial-up speed almost unbearable. To think that I once used a 300 baud acoustic coupler modem and thought I was cool...

Ooh deary me.

Out of interest, I was wondering how ADSL compares with other DSL's and cable. What sort of connections do you all have? And what speed do they claim/actually get to?
For example, my system is quoted as going up to 500k/s, but I've only got up to 60k/s so far.

Chris

Don't get confused between the speed BT quote which is in bits/second and the speed quoted by download sites which is in Bytes / Second.

512Kb/s = 64KB/s before you allow for network overheads etc, so if your getting 60KB/s through put your doing pretty well

And that speed is only for the link between you and the exchange, after that your sharing the link with everyone else so real life through put depends on what the links are like between your exchange and the site your trying to access also the amount of other traffic using it.

FYI
My cable modem also has a quoted top speed of 512Kb/s (Its capped at that by the ISP the modem can go a lot faster.)and I get similar throughput from known good sites sites during quiet times but I do see performance drop off quite a bit during the evening rush.

Prof, I have a cable modem and am about the only user on my local node. I have no bitrate contracted but it is always fast. It works like this. A DS3 goes to a local node that then splits out to any subscribers in the area. As I am about the only one at the moment I have the bigger portion of a DS3 at my disposal evidenced by a massive download I did the other day. 33 9.57 Mb downloads at 10K/sec and yesterday on napster I found a user that I could get 375K from. I am using the General Instruments (now motorola) Surfboard cable "modem" (huge pet peeve there, it is a network bridge not a modem, it can also function as a roter as almost all ADSL and cable "modems" really are) My upstream is limited to 128K or about BRI ISDN rates. At work we have a OC-12 terminating in our building that we get about a T3 out of but divide that by over 3000 people using it. I also have at my disposal here at work 6 ISDN BRI's (128K each), 1 T-1, 1 ADSL 768K line, 10 56K serial connections(frac T-1), 1 E-1, 20 56K modems (V.90) oh and one carrier pidgeon for emergencies . SDSL (Synchronous digital subscriber line(yet another pet peeve DSL line is redundant)) is faster than A(asynchronous)DSL because you ahve equal upstream and downstream rates. The DSL system can get up to 7MB/s line rates but rarely have a CIR (committed information rate, a contracted rate for lowest bandwidth available) over 1.5 MB/s. In the UK/Europe ISDN lines are far more popular than here in the states so BT and the other telco's have not pushed DSL Cable etc. as they charge more for ISDN. On this side of the pond DSL and Cable are getting very popular. DSL has a problem with the distance from your house to the CO (central office, where your phone calls are routed first and then into the telco cloud) SDSL needs to be very close ADSL also, IDSL can be much further but is slower. Cable is fast because of the wide pipes that they use for each node but the more people on that node the slower it gets. Cable is also less secure here, I do not know if it would be any different in the UK. For instance, if anyone else was on my node we would seem to be in the same network and I could browse to their machine if they had file sharing turned on in Windows. DSL does not have this issue. Sorry for the ramblin rant there, but as you all know I do this stuff for a living.

Marv

What rant? That's a fantastic load of information!

BB, I thought tere was a difference between the number on the modem and the speed. Which is why I was astonished to see BT's demonstration of a normal 56K modem bownloading at speeds of 56KB/s!

By God you know your subject, Marv! Very interesting stuff, this. Yes, I see now that the UK and its ADSL still has a lot of catching up to do with the American DSL's!
What I really loved once was during work experience. I was testing chips in the labs, and their spec list was next to the set on the table. It said something about so and so gigabytes being shifted per second. Yep, giga/bytes/ as opposed to /bits/!!
The sort of stuff my dad designs, you see.

Marv
If other users are dumb enough to have file sharing turned on and not have some form of firewall between their machines and the outside world, it won't be long before they get "visitors"

I think most people learn pretty quickly.

Trouble is I have to fight myslef not to be that visitor. I have allready formed a .txt file that I will put on their desktop telling them that they have been "hacked" (doooon't get me started on that term) and that they should do some basic security measures. Of course I leave one box open to the world as I really do not care if someone gets in to it. There is nothing on it that i am worried about and they cannot use it to forward spam or anything else.

Hi all!

*quickly distracts sea's "keepers" so that Matina can smuggle her a cinnamon bun*

B17, good to see you back unscathed from Reading!

Dr Munchers has such a good ring to it. I think that everyone's right, though. You should post pictures so that we have visual proof.

Prof, so many posts! I'm glad you are enjoying the wonderful world of high band!

Has anyone heard anything about the hacker war betwee China and the US? I am trying to check Attrition, but they seem to be suffering a DOS attack. (At least that's what it seems like. Its the only site I've tried that I can't reach...)

Matina! So nice to see you! Some tea, please. Thank you. *conspiratorial *

G7

Marv

I insist that Hacking is only used in its original and proper meaning.

And like you if someone leaves the doors wide open I can't resist having a look at whats inside

Good call Bloke. I cannot abide the misnomer of Hacker as a malicious teenager with a script to run. I am a hacker in the sense that I am a firewall expert and I love to explore security systems. But a real hacker just does it for the love of exploring, and you do not have to explore security to be a hacker. If you take apart every watch you own and put themback together and they work you are a watch hacker.

Marv, what I'm most amazed about with your long list of different network connections is that you've got an E1. I didn't think they existed over there.
Building comms chips, did I ever say I used to do that for a living. Jolly good fun it was too