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Hi Larry,
ISDN is not a DSL service. Its a telephone service. Normal telephone service is analog… stick a speaker anywhere on the line between your home and the telephone company and you would hear the conversation. ISDN is a digital telephone service… listen in on an ISDN line and all you would hear is hissing.
Regular telephone service is made for one thing; talking over. Modems try to make a telephone line do something it was never designed/meant to do; send data. And therein lies the problem; making something do a task it was never meant to do.
ISDN on the other hand was designed to send data. In fact, when you send voice over ISDN (say, calling in a pizza order), it converts your voice inside the ISDN telephone set to data before it ever leaves your house. Then before it gets to the destination (the pizza parlor), the telephone company changes it from data back into sounds.
Since ISDN was designed for data, it can connect your computer(s) to the Internet without fail. No noise, no disconnects, no changing speed. ISDN comes in two sizes; 1 ‘B’ channel or 2. A ‘B’ channel is the data channel that your call goes over, weither it be a voice call or a data call. A ‘B’ channel is 64kbps in size, always, without variation. So if you connect to the Internet with a ‘B’ channel on your ISDN line, it will always be 64kbps, both up and down. If you take the 2 ‘B’ channel size, then your connection will always be 128kbps (2 * 64kbps), everytime, up and down, without variation.
Note that the ISDN of course only exists between your home and the telephone company. Once you are out on the Internet itself, your actual download and upload speeds will be impacted by traffic on the net itself, remote server loads, etc.
Also note that if you go with the 2 ‘B’ channel size, each channel comes with its own telephone number, so you end up getting two ‘lines’ on the same ISDN line. Say you choose to make the first channel your Internet channel, and the second you want to also use for voice calls or a fax. You connect to the Internet at 128kbps. While using the net, you want to make a voice call, or a voice call comes in to your home. You pick up the phone, and the ISDN telephone set drops the second ‘B’ channel that connected to the Internet, reducing your speed to 64kbps. Once you finish your call, you hang up the phone, and the ISDN telephone set automatically puts the second channel back up to the Internet, bringing your speed back to 128kbps.
Latsly, note that while I’m using the term ‘ISDN telephone set’ for familierity, its actually called a Terminal Adapter, or TA.
Hope this helps
Actually, its your phone (and remote?) thats backwards. The numeric keypad on your PC is based on the numeric keypad on adding machines, and their offspring, calculators, going back to 1914 (David Sundstrand, Rockford, IL). As the zero was the most used key, it was placed large and at the bottom where the thumb could quickly operat it. The rest of the number counted upwards from there. Adding machine users quickly memorized the layout, much like typists memorize the QWERTY typewritter keyboard.
Back in 1960, The Bell System Technical Journal published the results of a ‘Pushbutton Telephone’ human factors study by R.L. Deininger. Part of this study were 16 different key placement arrangements. The very first arrangement (Group I, set I-A) was identical to the adding machine data entry layout. It was the tenth arrangement (group IV, set IV-A) that we have today (less the ‘*’ and ‘#’ which came much later). The adding machine layout had a much higher dialing error rate and lower dialing speed in the tests, possibly because the participants in the study (employees chosen at random at Murray Hill Bell Labs) did not have experiance as accountants or data entry clerks, and were not used to the upside down layout that adding machine users had already memorized.
So, the change for telephones (and remotes) was a simple decision based on the fact that the majority of telephone (and remote) users were not accounts.
[This message has been edited by CacheCows (edited 02-07-2003).]
Ken, I remember execpc when it was just a BBS. A co-worker of mine at Ameritech was the account rep for execpc. He recalled going into the basement of the house where the BBS was run, and seeing dozens of PCs out of cases all on shelves, each with a modem and a phone line running to it. When Execpc first tried the Internet, I was a beta tester. You still dialed into the BBS, then there was a text interface to send email and a text web browser.
As yourself, I too was a charter AOL user (1985), back when it was Quantum Computers and ran only on Commodore 64 computers and was called ‘Q-Link’. The service was only available from 6PM till dawn, at which time the programmers came into their offices and fixed the problems discovered during the night! A year later they offered ‘Apple Link’ which ran on Apple IIs. It was the fall of the next year I believe that Quantum changed the name of the product to ‘America Online’.
Steve, my first terminal as a kid was a TTY model 31. It was a baudot tape printer (didn’t print on paper, it printed on the paper tape, you had to read one VERY long sentence). Next I had a TTY 33 and thought I was set for life, it printed on paper! In my life I also had a prototype of the rare TTY43, and the full family of dataspeed 40s (CRT, 80 & 132 char line printers). I also ran Compuserve, GEnie, and The Source on all but the TTY31. Ah, those were the days!
I remember once I got tired of saving the programs I was writing onto papertape, so I hooked a tape recorder to the modem to record the sounds, and then just listed my program to the modem. When I wanted to reload, I just played the tape back. WOW, 110 baud casette tape storage But it beat paper tape!
TTY31:
TTY43:
[This message has been edited by CacheCows (edited 02-06-2003).]
You young whippersnappers! Why, when I was your age we had to hand carry each bit from our house to the Internet by hand, through 37″ of snow, in our bear feet, and were happy to do so, huh!
Cheesehead Dave is exactly right. DSL is often referred to as xDSL, where the ‘x’ can refer to many different letters depending on the type of DSL. Most residential DSL replaces the ‘x’ with ‘A’, for ADSL, meaning ‘Asymetrical DSL’ as the up and down speeds are different. Most residential folks want to GET things (files, web pages etc.) fast, not send them fast. The only folks that want to SEND things fast are those running servers, and that’s exactly what residential DSL providers want to prohibit. Again, as a comparison, the business DSL I sell replaces the ‘x’ with ‘S’ for SDSL, or ‘Symetrical DSL’ because our customers are almost always SENDing data to their customers from their servers.
Just a comment on the satellite services. There are two types; one way and two way. In one way, only your received data comes over the satellite, and its just a typical self instalable Dish Network type system. All the data you send out (your web requests, sent email, etc.) goes out your modem and phone line to a (hopefully) local ISP.
Two way satellite on the other hand uses the satellite for both up and down transmissions, no land lines are needed at all. These are great for rural areas. But note: as the dish is used to transmit data, it MUST be professionally installed by an FCC liscensed earth station installer, which is expensive, and you are not allowed to move it yourself.
One other satellite issue: due to the tremendous distance your signal has to go just to get from your location, to the satellite, and back to earth before it even begins to travel the normal Internet routes, you get some significant lag. While not typically noticible for most Internet applications, there are some (like online games, video conferencing, voice over IP) that will simply stink with that kind of latency.
Hope it helps!
Even though I run an ISP, you may still find answers contrary to what I’m posting…
1) There is no such thing as a ‘screen name’ on a true Internet connection, dialup or otherwise. Only services like AOL, MSN, Prodigy etc. that act as front ends to the Internet have screen names. When truely connected directly to the Internet, you have no identity. You do however have email addresses.
I’ve yet to see an ISP that didn’t provide at least one email address of your choice (the part to the left of the ‘@’ sign), and many provide more than one. Some have a nominal charge for additional addresses. Check with the providers you are looking at as to how many they provide for the basic price, and how much additional are.
There is no difference in pricing and quantity of email addresses between dialup, DSL, and cable. There are only differences between providers; not between dialup and broadband.
2) Wow, including a dialup account for traveling along with your broadband access. Never seen that combination. You would be limited to looking at nationwide providers I would think so they might have access numbers across the country. I would imagine that they would probably charge extra for this, probably actually selling you a dialup account along with your broadband. Note again though that since there are no identities actually tied to true Internet access, even if you had two accounts (dialup and broadband) they would work seamlessly together; no one would be able to tell which connection you were using at any given time.
3) Any respectable ISP will include personal webspace for your use at no additional cost.
Just a note: There are some basic differences between cable and DSL. DSL is a dedicated connection that goes from your home to your local telephone company central office, and from there onto the ISP’s network. Cable however uses the shared cable that serves you, your neighbors, and your surrounding community. This means two things: your available bandwidth ‘can’ be effected by your neighbors with cable access, but not on DLS. And there are some security risks to cable due to others sharing the line that you won’t see with DSL.
DSL has its own problems related to cost. Bandwidth is very expensive to an ISP. To make money, they want to cram as many customers as they can onto the bandwidth they have. DSL, because it uses so much of that precious bandwidth, is a hard sell at the prices it actually costs the ISP. So, to make up for it, the ‘norm’ for residential DSL is to over subscribe it back on the ISP’s network. While you will have 100% of the DSL line’s bandwidth dedicated to you, you will typically find that back at the ISP its been oversubscribed by 50:1 to 100:1. That’s the only way they can afford to sell it around the $50 mark. So ask the ISP (and cable company for that matter) what the guarenteed bandwidth (up and down) are, and get it in writting.
To give you a comparrison, at my company we only sell commercial (business) DSL that is NOT oversubscribed. 256kb of bandwidth costs $256/month. A residential customer would swear at us for that price and accuse us of price gouging (and they do), but its because we don’t over subscribe the line and sell it at what it costs us (and a very nominal markup). Businesses recognize this and pay; the motto is that ‘good bandwidth costs’.
Hope this helps!
There is a free database program fro all Palm based PDAs called Pilot-DB.
Last year I wrote a geocaching database for it I use for logging my finds. My database records:
- Cache name
- Date found (uses popup calendar centered on the current date)
- Who found it (uses a configuarable drop down list of team members)
- Up to three trades (what you left/took)
- And a free from comment field
In the main database the cache name, date, and finder are all displayed in a table, and you can sort up or down on any column. The table can be scrolled sideways to view the other fileds. Clicking on any row brings up the data for that find. You can search on any/all fileds, and build up to 4 saved filters. The filters will filter the displayed table to show only finds matching the filter.
Anyone who might want a copy of my database, just let me know… I should be able to figure out how to share it I have no idea how it compares to the Maryland program, mine may be far inferior, and you do have to install the free Pilot-DB first to use mine.
Again, sorry for the delays, but the award graphics have now been sent to the past winners!
Lowrance 100! Excellent choice, shows you’re a pro
Welcome to the sport, and to WGA!
Guess you can’t guess what GPS we use
My PC bootup screen says:
Keyboard failure detected, press F1 to continueand another Windows PC reads:
Mouse not detected, click on OK to continuequote:
Originally posted by MR Andersen:
Most caches are placed “Don’t ask – Don’t tell”.
Not that we are promoting that practice of course
Keep us posted on the outcome, inquiring minds want to know
[This message has been edited by CacheCows (edited 01-27-2003).]
Well, a critical question has been answered!
We now know that if geocaching.com ever goes down, caches posted on the WGA forums will work!
This concludes the test of the Emergency Cache Posting System… This was only a test.
Thanks Steve!
[This message has been edited by CacheCows (edited 01-27-2003).]
The graphics are done… been busy.
This is the first time I’ve even been able to check the boards in days, sorry.
Will get to it asap
[This message has been edited by CacheCows (edited 01-26-2003).]
I too had noticed his absence in the logs since his caches were violated. I missed seeing his presence…
When I saw his picture in the WGA meeting photo album, I was very pleased
Glad to see you back and active Socko!
T&B, nice touch going to the extra effort to look up his stats.
There has been some discussion regarding to what makes a cache eligible for nomination. As some great caches were created prior to WGA’s existance, we flet it best to leave any cache that has never won COTM to be eligible for nomination. If a new cacher hits an old cache and nominates it, seeing its listed may prompt some old timers to remember what a grat hunt it was and cast their vote for it. Or they may choose or nominate another.
The nomination process just gets a cache listed on the ballot with a single vote, and others may then choose to vote likewise. And if a cache comes in a close second one month, who knows, it may get nominated again the next month.
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