Google Groups no longer supports new Usenet posts or subscriptions. Historical content remains viewable.
Dismiss

verizon (ptui!)

47 views
Skip to first unread message

Shmuel Metz

unread,
Dec 31, 2010, 11:38:39 AM12/31/10
to
Out here in NoVa the telephone local loops are owned by verizon
(ptui!). My neighbors had a problem with their telephone and verizon
mucked around with the wiring, in the process killing my service. Now,
from my perspective a professional cleans up after himself, even if it
means paying overtime, and a repair that breaks something else is not
a completed repair. But this is verizon we're talking about, so
expectaions of rdesponsible behavior do not apply.

My neighbor told me that AT&T[1] had been working on their line at
about the same time as mine went dead, and I reported that to my
telephone company. They told me that because of the Xmas rush they
couldn't get to it until the 28th. When she later told me that her
husband said that it *was* verizon that messed with the lines, I
called my carrier, informed them of the fact and told them that under
the circumstances the 28th was unacceptable; at that point they
escalated the issue with verizon.

When verizon finally shows up, they knock at my door and disappear
before I have time to respond, leaving their truck. Silly me, I think
that they are going to repair the problem. I pick up my telephone and
there is a dial tone[2]. It doesn't last. I go downstairs and the
truck is gone.

I call my carrier again; verizon tells[3] them that they will be there
by 6:00 PM. They aren't, of course, so I call my carrier again and
request a further escalation.

Finally, on Thursday, someone shows up. He says that there is a signal
on the outside box and asks to see the inside box. He says that the
signal is on the wrong wire. After some further tests he goes to the
outside box and discovers a broken wire.

I know that there are issues with c*x. But I can promise you that if I
get broadband it will not involve Hell Atlantic. May all of their
servers be compromised and used to spam porn to the local police. May
they be simultaneously raided by DEA and BATF. May their entire
boardroom be listed in the files of the local bawdy house and
publicized in the wake of a police raid. May thier children disown
tham and their wives cheat with syphilitic camels. May they wake up in
bed with R*d*n* G*rst.

[1] was surprised, since AT&T does not own the local loop.

[2] Despair is so much more devasting when you first raise
false hopes.

[3] Thir lips are moving

--
Shmuel (Seymour J.) Metz <http://patriot.net/~shmuel> ISO position
Reply to domain Patriot dot net user shmuel+bspfh to contact me.
We don't care. We don't have to care, we're Congress.
(S877: The Shut up and Eat Your spam act of 2003)

John F. Eldredge

unread,
Dec 31, 2010, 1:27:17 PM12/31/10
to

I had a somewhat similar experience with Bell South, the local branch of
AT&T, about 15 years ago. I was starting to notice more noise on my
landline, and then it started going dead every time there was a rain or a
morning with heavy dew. However, within a couple of hours after the sun
came out, the phone line would go back to working. I reported this to
Bell South one morning, and came home that evening to find that the phone
was working, and I had a computer-generated message on my answering
machine, saying "Your phone line has been remotely tested and is in
correct working order."

Next morning, the line was dead again. I called Bell South again, and
came home that evening to find the phone working. However, the following
morning, the phone was, once again, not working. I called Bell South
once more, and was told (by a human) that a technician had checked my
phone junction box the previous day and not found any problems. When I
told the operator that my phone was nevertheless not working, she said,
"Well, we will have a technician there during the hour." I called my
boss and explained why I would be late in arriving at work that day, and
then waited for the technician to arrive.

When the technician arrived, he removed the cover from the junction box
and found that the connectors inside were so corroded, it was a wonder
that the box worked even under low-humidity conditions. He said that the
box was the type used in the late 1950s, when my house had been built.
Apparently, the technician on the previous day had not bothered removing
the box cover to check the junction box, if he had even bothered to come
by the house. The new technician replaced the junction box, and my phone
has worked since then, without any problems. I called the phone company,
and told the maintenance supervisor about the situation, and about the
first technician's having apparently not checked the junction box. I
never heard anything further from the phone company, so I don't know what
repercussions there were for the first technician.

--
John F. Eldredge -- jo...@jfeldredge.com
"Reserve your right to think, for even to think wrongly
is better than not to think at all." -- Hypatia of Alexandria

Joe Zeff

unread,
Dec 31, 2010, 1:45:46 PM12/31/10
to
On Fri, 31 Dec 2010 11:38:39 -0500, Shmuel (Seymour J.) Metz wrote:

> May they wake up in
> bed with R*d*n* G*rst.

May the TSA put their entire manglement on the Strip Search At Every Stop
list.

--
Joe Zeff -- The Guy With The Sideburns:
http://www.zeff.us http://www.lasfs.info
It was long ago, and far away; and besides, the wench is Fred.

Howard S Shubs

unread,
Dec 31, 2010, 5:52:14 PM12/31/10
to
In article <8o6lk4...@mid.individual.net>,

"John F. Eldredge" <jo...@jfeldredge.com> wrote:

> When the technician arrived, he removed the cover from the junction box
> and found that the connectors inside were so corroded, it was a wonder
> that the box worked even under low-humidity conditions. He said that the
> box was the type used in the late 1950s, when my house had been built.
> Apparently, the technician on the previous day had not bothered removing
> the box cover to check the junction box, if he had even bothered to come
> by the house. The new technician replaced the junction box, and my phone
> has worked since then, without any problems. I called the phone company,
> and told the maintenance supervisor about the situation, and about the
> first technician's having apparently not checked the junction box. I
> never heard anything further from the phone company, so I don't know what
> repercussions there were for the first technician.

Sometimes, they DO get it right.

When I moved into an apartment at Randolph, Massachusetts in 1989, there
was a strike going on at NYNEX. But I wanted my two lines for
phone/modem! They sent out a manager and an accountant who was learning
the technical side. They got it done. The accountant was really into
it, too. Gave him a chance to see bits of the business he'd not had the
chance to see previously.

Around 2002, I had DSL with Verizon in Westfield, Massachusetts. I
wanted faster service, but they tried and couldn't do it. After several
tries, they sent out a team of something like three or four people to
figure out what was happening. The problem had to do with the way my
apartment building had been wired for telephone, with a 24-unit building
having a single 25-pair cable wired sequentially around the building.
It had been built in the early 1960s at the latest, which explained it.
They had to give up, but damn it, they TRIED.

--
Don't bother with piddly crap like "gun control".
Life is 100% fatal. Ban it.

David Gersic

unread,
Dec 31, 2010, 8:04:39 PM12/31/10
to
On 31 Dec 2010 18:27:17 GMT, John F. Eldredge <jo...@jfeldredge.com> wrote:
> has worked since then, without any problems. I called the phone company,
> and told the maintenance supervisor about the situation, and about the
> first technician's having apparently not checked the junction box. I
> never heard anything further from the phone company, so I don't know what
> repercussions there were for the first technician.

Most likely: promoted to management.

Steve VanDevender

unread,
Dec 31, 2010, 10:29:35 PM12/31/10
to
Joe Zeff <the.guy.with....@lasfs.info> writes:

> May the TSA put their entire manglement on the Strip Search At Every Stop
> list.

I don't know if that's more of a curse for the TSA or the manglement.
But not enough of a curse for either.

--
Steve VanDevender "I ride the big iron" http://hexadecimal.uoregon.edu/
ste...@hexadecimal.uoregon.edu PGP keyprint 4AD7AF61F0B9DE87 522902969C0A7EE8
Little things break, circuitry burns / Time flies while my little world turns
Every day comes, every day goes / 100 years and nobody shows -- Happy Rhodes

Richard Gadsden

unread,
Jan 1, 2011, 5:54:26 AM1/1/11
to
On 31/12/2010 18:45, Joe Zeff wrote:
> On Fri, 31 Dec 2010 11:38:39 -0500, Shmuel (Seymour J.) Metz wrote:
>
>> May they wake up in
>> bed with R*d*n* G*rst.
>
> May the TSA put their entire manglement on the Strip Search At Every Stop
> list.

May every gift anyone ever buys them be "delivered" by CityLink

--
Richard Gadsden ric...@gadsden.name
"I disagree with what you say but I will defend to
the death your right to say it" - Attributed to Voltaire

Paul

unread,
Jan 1, 2011, 9:48:16 AM1/1/11
to
Shmuel (Seymour J.) Metz <spam...@library.lspace.org.invalid> wrote
in news:4d1e070f$1$fuzhry+tra$mr2...@news.patriot.net:

> May they wake up in bed with R*d*n* G*rst.

And I had almost purged the memory of having seen her image from my
mind.

--
Paul the Legacy Server
Full Recovery reached May 30, 2008
"People can be educated beyond their intelligence"
-- Marilyn vos Savant

Shmuel Metz

unread,
Jan 1, 2011, 5:50:18 PM1/1/11
to
In <8o6lk4...@mid.individual.net>, on 12/31/2010

at 06:27 PM, "John F. Eldredge" <jo...@jfeldredge.com> said:

>I had a somewhat similar experience with Bell South, the local branch
>of AT&T,

Actually, bull souse owns AT&T.

>so I don't know what
>repercussions there were for the first technician.

Promotion.

David Taylor

unread,
Jan 1, 2011, 6:28:58 PM1/1/11
to
On 2010-12-31, John F. Eldredge <jo...@jfeldredge.com> wrote:
> I called the phone company,
> and told the maintenance supervisor about the situation, and about the
> first technician's having apparently not checked the junction box. I
> never heard anything further from the phone company, so I don't know what
> repercussions there were for the first technician.

The first one was given a bonus for increasing productivty, and the second
one was sacked for revealing the problem to you?

--
David Taylor

Shmuel Metz

unread,
Jan 1, 2011, 6:40:05 PM1/1/11
to
In <howard-E5FBA5....@d90-136-209-74.cust.tele2.de>, on
12/31/2010

at 03:52 PM, Howard S Shubs <how...@shubs.net> said:

>Sometimes, they DO get it right.

Without penalty?

Howard S Shubs

unread,
Jan 2, 2011, 3:27:43 PM1/2/11
to
In article <4d1fbb55$2$fuzhry+tra$mr2...@news.patriot.net>,

Shmuel (Seymour J.) Metz <spam...@library.lspace.org.invalid> wrote:

> In <howard-E5FBA5....@d90-136-209-74.cust.tele2.de>, on
> 12/31/2010
> at 03:52 PM, Howard S Shubs <how...@shubs.net> said:
>
> >Sometimes, they DO get it right.
>
> Without penalty?

Well, they were dealing with a strike in the first case. <shrug>

Message has been deleted

Seebs

unread,
Jan 2, 2011, 9:42:56 PM1/2/11
to
On 2011-01-02, Morten <cla...@spamcop.net> wrote:

> Paul wrote:
>> Shmuel (Seymour J.) Metz <spam...@library.lspace.org.invalid> wrote
>> in news:4d1e070f$1$fuzhry+tra$mr2...@news.patriot.net:

>>> May they wake up in bed with R*d*n* G*rst.

>> And I had almost purged the memory of having seen her image from my
>> mind.

> The one thing I'm quite sure you CAN take with you is that image...

The awesome thing being, I have no idea at all what you're talking about.

<nelson>ha ha</nelson>

-s
--
Copyright 2010, all wrongs reversed. Peter Seebach / usenet...@seebs.net
http://www.seebs.net/log/ <-- lawsuits, religion, and funny pictures
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_Game_(Scientology) <-- get educated!
I am not speaking for my employer, although they do rent some of my opinions.

mrob...@att.net

unread,
Jan 3, 2011, 2:48:46 AM1/3/11
to
Shmuel (Seymour J.) Metz <spam...@library.lspace.org.invalid> wrote:
> Out here in NoVa the telephone local loops are owned by verizon
> (ptui!)

If your customer service inspires your customers to hate you enough
that you have to change the name of your company (nee GTE), this should
be some kind of hint.

> I know that there are issues with c*x.

So far, my approximately 1 year of C*mc*st service [0] has not gone as
well as my approximately 8 years of C*x service. In those eight years
with C*x, there were maybe two or three instances of unexplained
outages. There were more outages, but they had explanations, such as
1) the ice storm that also killed the power for a week and 2) one night
I couldn't sleep, was screwing around on the computer, 'net connection
quit, I took a walk and saw a C*x tech up on a ladder messing with
something, when I got back to the house all was fine.

I bought a V*rg*n USB wireless modem in late 2009 for a business trip.
I used it for less than an hour on that trip, but have used it for
several hours so far as a backup during C*mc*st failures. The initial
purchase cost was high and the airtime isn't that cheap; I partly
justify it on the basis that Mr. Branson gives a little of the money
to cool people like Mr. Rutan.

Matt Roberds

[0] If your customer service inspires your customers to visit your
premises with a hammer and start smashing things, this should be
some kind of hint.

Seebs

unread,
Jan 3, 2011, 3:34:16 AM1/3/11
to
On 2011-01-03, mrob...@att.net <mrob...@att.net> wrote:
> [0] If your customer service inspires your customers to visit your
> premises with a hammer and start smashing things, this should be
> some kind of hint.

... Especially if it results in a substantial improvement to the
quality of service.

Garrett Wollman

unread,
Jan 3, 2011, 11:25:59 AM1/3/11
to
In article <ifrv0u$7te$2...@news.eternal-september.org>,

<mrob...@att.net> wrote:
>Shmuel (Seymour J.) Metz <spam...@library.lspace.org.invalid> wrote:
>> Out here in NoVa the telephone local loops are owned by verizon
>> (ptui!)
>
>If your customer service inspires your customers to hate you enough
>that you have to change the name of your company (nee GTE), this should
>be some kind of hint.

The part of Verizon that Shmuel deals with is the old Chesapeake &
Potomac Telephone Co., not the Great Telephone Experiment.

-GAWollman
--
Garrett A. Wollman | What intellectual phenomenon can be older, or more oft
wol...@bimajority.org| repeated, than the story of a large research program
Opinions not shared by| that impaled itself upon a false central assumption
my employers. | accepted by all practitioners? - S.J. Gould, 1993

David DeLaney

unread,
Jan 3, 2011, 7:29:06 PM1/3/11
to
Seebs <usenet...@seebs.net> wrote:
>mrob...@att.net <mrob...@att.net> wrote:
>> [0] If your customer service inspires your customers to visit your
>> premises with a hammer and start smashing things, this should be
>> some kind of hint.
>
>... Especially if it results in a substantial improvement to the
>quality of service.

"Knowing where to smash with the hammer .............. $2000"

Dave "will do memetic adjustments for food" DeLaney
--
\/David DeLaney posting from d...@vic.com "It's not the pot that grows the flower
It's not the clock that slows the hour The definition's plain for anyone to see
Love is all it takes to make a family" - R&P. VISUALIZE HAPPYNET VRbeable<BLINK>
http://www.vic.com/~dbd/ - net.legends FAQ & Magic / I WUV you in all CAPS! --K.

Shmuel Metz

unread,
Jan 3, 2011, 10:03:47 AM1/3/11
to
In <ifrv0u$7te$2...@news.eternal-september.org>, on 01/03/2011

at 07:48 AM, mrob...@att.net said:

>If your customer service inspires your customers to hate you enough
>that you have to change the name of your company (nee GTE), this
>should be some kind of hint.

It wasn't a simple name change, it was a pair of mergers. First C&P
became part of Hell Atlantic, then Hell Atlantic and GTE merged.

>So far, my approximately 1 year of C*mc*st service [0] has not gone
>as well as my approximately 8 years of C*x service.

Fortunately scamcast is not an option in Fairfax County, or at least
not in my section of it. I've got a friend who is enjoying their
service, and if he's ever had a good word for them I can't recall it.

Joe Thompson

unread,
Jan 3, 2011, 9:38:29 PM1/3/11
to
On 2011-01-03, Shmuel Metz <spam...@library.lspace.org.invalid> wrote:
> Fortunately scamcast is not an option in Fairfax County, or at least
> not in my section of it. I've got a friend who is enjoying their
> service, and if he's ever had a good word for them I can't recall it.

Out here in Wild, Wonderful West Virginia (or at least our part of it)
the choice is between Comcast cable Internet, Frontier DSL, and Dish
satellite with dialup for the outbound. Comcast is pretty universally
agreed to be the least-worst option.

Frontier has especially failed to impress me, as when their broadband
was criticized recently they insisted they have fiber in "95% of the
county". This apparently means "we have a fiber ring and eventually,
maybe if we feel like it, 95% of the county will be inside a line drawn
on a service map." -- Joe
--
Joe Thompson -
E-mail addresses in headers are valid. | http://www.orion-com.com/
"...the FDA takes a dim view of exploding pharmaceuticals..." -- Derek Lowe

TimC

unread,
Jan 3, 2011, 11:43:20 PM1/3/11
to
On 2011-01-04, Joe Thompson (aka Bruce)
was almost, but not quite, entirely unlike tea:

> Out here in Wild, Wonderful West Virginia (or at least our part of it)
> the choice is between Comcast cable Internet, Frontier DSL, and Dish
> satellite with dialup for the outbound. Comcast is pretty universally
> agreed to be the least-worst option.
>
> Frontier has especially failed to impress me, as when their broadband
> was criticized recently they insisted they have fiber in "95% of the
> county". This apparently means "we have a fiber ring and eventually,
> maybe if we feel like it, 95% of the county will be inside a line drawn
> on a service map." -- Joe

The US phone and data system amuses me. Here, most people use ADSL,
unless they're so far from civilsation that satellite is the only
option, and as long as you stay away from the 2 big providers and
bunch of shonky littler ones that nevertheless have a very large
advertising budget, you'll do fine.

The phone system was built thousands of years ago by a government
telco, which was then privatised when the profit margin became too
large. So now the essential but near obsolescent service
infrastructure is owned by a private company whose share price is
dropping surprisingly rapidly, to much detriment of those who invested
their life savings in said company when it was floated, and to much
laughter of those of us who always suspected it was a bad idea to put
all of one's eggs in the one rotting basket. The use of this
privatised infrastructure is rented out to the public by the same
privatised company who have farmed out most of the service to India,
but fortunately are required by law to wholesale to competant third
parties as well.

I recently saw an advertisement from them that started to make me
think that perhaps they had finally made their plans half decent, so I
investigated further. But once you actually look at the speeds
associated with those data limits, and look past the first 6 months
(no idea how they get that past the Competition Consumer Commission,
but the fine print shows the rest of the 18 month period is charged at
twice the rate shown in bold lettering in any given advertisement;
they are the most complained about company afterall) and see the full
quoted offer that you're stuck with for 24 months, you start to
wonder. I offered to change Mum's plan for her, but her husband
decided it was just too complicated. I'm currently typing on the end
of one of these connections at my grapefruit's house, and the
unexplained dropouts, "interesting" DNS behaviour and treatment of non
HTTP traffic is rather trying.

--
TimC
> Time is nature's way of making sure that everything doesn't happen at once.
And space is so that it doesn't all happen to you.
-- Matthew L. Martin and John D Salt in ARK

Kevin Goebel

unread,
Jan 4, 2011, 12:56:43 AM1/4/11
to
On Mon, 03 Jan 2011 10:03:47 -0500, Shmuel (Seymour J.) Metz
<spam...@library.lspace.org.invalid> wrote:

>In <ifrv0u$7te$2...@news.eternal-september.org>, on 01/03/2011
> at 07:48 AM, mrob...@att.net said:

>>So far, my approximately 1 year of C*mc*st service [0] has not gone
>>as well as my approximately 8 years of C*x service.

>Fortunately scamcast is not an option in Fairfax County, or at least
>not in my section of it. I've got a friend who is enjoying their
>service, and if he's ever had a good word for them I can't recall it.

Scamcast isn't an option in my neck of the woods.us, but they love to
randomly drop their DNS entries for my employer's b2b web servers for
multi-state sections of the country. Their name is in my checklist of
trouble-shooting questions when customers call our HelpMe! HelpMe! desk.

Kevin Goebel

Joe Zeff

unread,
Jan 4, 2011, 1:06:05 AM1/4/11
to
On Mon, 03 Jan 2011 10:03:47 -0500, Shmuel (Seymour J.) Metz wrote:

> I've got a friend who is enjoying their service, and if he's ever had a
> good word for them I can't recall it.

I gather from what you say that he doesn't enjoy it very much.

--
Joe Zeff -- The Guy With The Sideburns:
http://www.zeff.us http://www.lasfs.info

*Sigh* It's almost as if they interpret the Bible as Microsoft does
RFCs.

Garrett Wollman

unread,
Jan 4, 2011, 1:16:02 AM1/4/11
to
In article <4d22b8cd$0$8867$ec3e...@unlimited.usenetmonster.com>,

Joe Zeff <the.guy.with....@lasfs.info> wrote:
>On Mon, 03 Jan 2011 10:03:47 -0500, Shmuel (Seymour J.) Metz wrote:
>
>> I've got a friend who is enjoying [Comcast's] service, and if he's ever had a

>> good word for them I can't recall it.
>
>I gather from what you say that he doesn't enjoy it very much.

They are actually doing some reasonably intelligent things, but you
wouldn't know it from dealing with their customer-disservice side.
They had a persistent problem with two (just two!) of their DNS
servers for most of December, and the only way we could get them to do
anything about it was by asking one of our faculty who happens to be
on a committee with one of their high muckity-mucks to try to drive
resolution from top of the pyramid down. All too often their phone
firewall doesn't even know what their own Web pages tell customers to
do.

Meanwhile, I am paying for a fairly expensive tier of their video
service which includes a bunch of expensive sports channels but
inexplicably doesn't include the dirt-cheap C-SPAN2 and C-SPAN3.

Steve VanDevender

unread,
Jan 4, 2011, 1:51:28 AM1/4/11
to
d...@gatekeeper.vic.com (David DeLaney) writes:

> Seebs <usenet...@seebs.net> wrote:
>>mrob...@att.net <mrob...@att.net> wrote:
>>> [0] If your customer service inspires your customers to visit your
>>> premises with a hammer and start smashing things, this should be
>>> some kind of hint.
>>
>>... Especially if it results in a substantial improvement to the
>>quality of service.
>
> "Knowing where to smash with the hammer .............. $2000"

Why am I reminded of "I'll pound your balls flat with a wooden mallet"?

> Dave "will do memetic adjustments for food" DeLaney

--

Dave Hughes

unread,
Jan 4, 2011, 7:51:56 AM1/4/11
to
On Tue, 04 Jan 2011 15:43:20 +1100, TimC wrote:

> and as long as you stay away from the 2 big providers and bunch of
> shonky littler ones that nevertheless have a very large advertising
> budget, you'll do fine.

#2's cable options aren't that bad IME. ISTR a few other denizens not
complaining loudly as well.

--
Dave Hughes - da...@hired-goons.net
Where there's a flame-thrower, there's a way - Earl Grey

Shmuel Metz

unread,
Jan 4, 2011, 5:06:09 AM1/4/11
to
In <4d22b8cd$0$8867$ec3e...@unlimited.usenetmonster.com>, on
01/04/2011

at 06:06 AM, Joe Zeff <the.guy.with....@lasfs.info> said:

>I gather from what you say that he doesn't enjoy it very much.

Almost as much as root canal.

Joe Thompson

unread,
Jan 4, 2011, 11:21:52 AM1/4/11
to
On 2011-01-04, Kevin Goebel <kevi...@kevingoebel.com> wrote:
> Scamcast isn't an option in my neck of the woods.us, but they love to
> randomly drop their DNS entries for my employer's b2b web servers for
> multi-state sections of the country.

Just lately they seem to be s/entries for my employer's b2b web
servers // rather a lot. OpenDNS got very popular very fast. -- Joe

Brian Kantor

unread,
Jan 4, 2011, 11:38:22 AM1/4/11
to
>#2's cable options aren't that bad IME. ISTR a few other denizens not
>complaining loudly as well.

Today is the last day that big-dish satellite TV service is available to
the lowly home consumer. As a result, I've been forced into subscribing
to a bunch of tripe channels that I've no desire to watch in order to
get the three that I do want. It's T*m*-W*rn*r cable.

The installer (from the signage on the truck, a contractor) was a nice
guy and only arrived a hour late, but was somewhat clueless - apparently
"prewired live outlet" isn't part of his vocabulary, as even after being
told that, he insisted he had to go up on the roof, where my dish isn't,
in order to disconnect it. I think it was seeing that the cable entered
the house alongside the six-inch bundle of coax from all the ham radio
antennas that finally persuaded him to listen to me say "just plug it
in and it'll work".

OTOH, the picture quality isn't too bad, not near as sharp as direct
C-band reception and some of the expected digital artifacts, but the
added quality of the few HD channels almost makes up for that.

I wonder how long the hard drive in the cable box will last. I hope
they put a new drive in when they refurbed it after the last customer
was through with it. I haven't bothered to open it up and look yet.

All the damn anti-copying technology makes audio/video switching a bitch;
evey time you change sources everything has to renegotiate keys and
you get a silent blank screen for an annoyingly long time.

Adding video service doesn't seem to have affected the cable modem
internet service. It's only been a week and the modem hasn't crashed yet.
It only does so about once or twice a month, typically right in the
middle of a vi editing session. Often it comes back up in less than
an hour. Unless their DHCP/DNS service is down again.

At least it's not the phone company.
- Brian

Joe Zeff

unread,
Jan 4, 2011, 2:08:07 PM1/4/11
to
On Tue, 04 Jan 2011 16:38:22 +0000, Brian Kantor wrote:

> As a result, I've been forced into subscribing to a bunch of tripe
> channels that I've no desire to watch in order to get the three that I
> do want. It's T*m*-W*rn*r cable.

I too get TV service from The Eye Of Horus. Every now and then Marcia
and I get bored with what's on and start wandering around the channels.
Most of the time, nothing. Every now and then, however, we luck into
something. And, of course, the more channels included, the better the
chance that one of them will have something watchable when you need it.

--
Joe Zeff -- The Guy With The Sideburns:
http://www.zeff.us http://www.lasfs.info

I mean, if it was an obscenity filter, I could understand
it rejecting on, say, 'Windows'.

Joe Zeff

unread,
Jan 4, 2011, 2:11:12 PM1/4/11
to
On Tue, 04 Jan 2011 06:16:02 +0000, Garrett Wollman wrote:

> All too often their phone
> firewall doesn't even know what their own Web pages tell customers to
> do.

Well, of course not. Phone firewalls run on cheat-sheets, and if they're
not in sync with the external web pages, the average droid won't even be
aware of it because checking such things isn't in *their* job description
and they're not paid to care.

--
Joe Zeff -- The Guy With The Sideburns:
http://www.zeff.us http://www.lasfs.info

I'll have to try and get an item written into the DR plan specifying a
run to Krispy Kreme for sysadmin fuel, since it'd no doubt be a long
night ahead.

Zebee Johnstone

unread,
Jan 4, 2011, 2:13:27 PM1/4/11
to
In alt.sysadmin.recovery on Tue, 04 Jan 2011 23:51:56 +1100

Dave Hughes <spam...@hired-goons.net> wrote:
> On Tue, 04 Jan 2011 15:43:20 +1100, TimC wrote:
>
>> and as long as you stay away from the 2 big providers and bunch of
>> shonky littler ones that nevertheless have a very large advertising
>> budget, you'll do fine.
>
> #2's cable options aren't that bad IME. ISTR a few other denizens not
> complaining loudly as well.

I use a reseller of #2, who also have a lot of their own equipment in
the mix, and who have been uniformly good. Cheap,
competent, and I can't complain about the speed and reliability.

Which is more than I can say for #1 who when I changed to #2 for my
phone system promptly broke said phone system for 6 weeks. They
*say* it was because the (badly maintained no doubt) copper
infrastructure needed work, I suspect they have a field in their
database which turns your service off as punishment....

Zebee

mikea

unread,
Jan 4, 2011, 2:20:44 PM1/4/11
to
Joe Zeff <the.guy.with....@lasfs.info> wrote in <4d237017$0$10230$ec3e...@unlimited.usenetmonster.com>:

> And, of course, the more channels included, the better the
> chance that one of them will have something watchable when you need it.

This is not, in my experience, true in the general case. The additional
channels all seem to have something which at best is not attractive, and
more often appeals to depraved tastes. Think Jerry Springer, one of the
"People's Court"-style shows, "Hoarders", "Intervention", "Dog the Bounty
Hunter", etc.

Newton Minow's vast wasteland has only grown even vaster and more wasted.

--
What should be written on the point end of a claymore?
- - -
"This end tae enemy."

Message has been deleted

Ignatios Souvatzis

unread,
Jan 4, 2011, 5:04:59 PM1/4/11
to
Seebs wrote:
> On 2011-01-02, Morten <cla...@spamcop.net> wrote:
>> Paul wrote:
>>> Shmuel (Seymour J.) Metz <spam...@library.lspace.org.invalid> wrote
>>> in news:4d1e070f$1$fuzhry+tra$mr2...@news.patriot.net:
>
>>>> May they wake up in bed with R*d*n* G*rst.
>
>>> And I had almost purged the memory of having seen her image from my
>>> mind.
>
>> The one thing I'm quite sure you CAN take with you is that image...
>
> The awesome thing being, I have no idea at all what you're talking about.

Don't believe them. There's nothing wrong with her image, and (her fantasy
of) her bedtime activities (unless, maybe, you expect to share beds with
teenagers for the next 50 years, maybe). The objectionable part is what
her mind does.

-is
--
seal your e-mail: http://www.gnupg.org/

Ignatios Souvatzis

unread,
Jan 4, 2011, 5:10:47 PM1/4/11
to
Joe Zeff wrote:
> On Tue, 04 Jan 2011 06:16:02 +0000, Garrett Wollman wrote:
>
>> All too often their phone
>> firewall doesn't even know what their own Web pages tell customers to
>> do.
>
> Well, of course not. Phone firewalls run on cheat-sheets, and if they're
> not in sync with the external web pages, the average droid won't even be
> aware of it because checking such things isn't in *their* job description
> and they're not paid to care.

Being farmed out to disservice providers, the actual phone firewall operator
is most probably not *allowed* to do anything not in the cheat sheet.

Seebs

unread,
Jan 4, 2011, 6:51:17 PM1/4/11
to
On 2011-01-04, Ignatios Souvatzis <u50...@beverly.kleinbus.org> wrote:
> Seebs wrote:

>>>>> May they wake up in bed with R*d*n* G*rst.

>> The awesome thing being, I have no idea at all what you're talking about.

> Don't believe them. There's nothing wrong with her image, and (her fantasy
> of) her bedtime activities (unless, maybe, you expect to share beds with
> teenagers for the next 50 years, maybe). The objectionable part is what
> her mind does.

Ahh, but:

% ls R*d*n*\ G*rst
ls: No match.

I continue to maintain that this is possibly one of the most misleading
error messages I've ever seen. However, I have now seen a worse one;
a buggy perl build script which was invoked by make, and thus chose
to emit the message: "make: No rule to make target 'foo'" when the perl
script failed.

Not the most frustrating debugging experience I've ever had, but certainly
a contender.

Richard Gadsden

unread,
Jan 4, 2011, 8:18:37 PM1/4/11
to
On 03/01/2011 02:42, Seebs wrote:
> On 2011-01-02, Morten<cla...@spamcop.net> wrote:
>> Paul wrote:
>>> Shmuel (Seymour J.) Metz<spam...@library.lspace.org.invalid> wrote
>>> in news:4d1e070f$1$fuzhry+tra$mr2...@news.patriot.net:
>
>>>> May they wake up in bed with R*d*n* G*rst.
>
>>> And I had almost purged the memory of having seen her image from my
>>> mind.
>
>> The one thing I'm quite sure you CAN take with you is that image...
>
> The awesome thing being, I have no idea at all what you're talking about.
>
> <nelson>ha ha</nelson>

OK, I give up. EXPN?

--
Richard Gadsden ric...@gadsden.name
"I disagree with what you say but I will defend to
the death your right to say it" - Attributed to Voltaire

stevo

unread,
Jan 4, 2011, 8:29:13 PM1/4/11
to
Steve VanDevender <ste...@hexadecimal.uoregon.edu> wrote:
> d...@gatekeeper.vic.com (David DeLaney) writes:
>
>> Seebs <usenet...@seebs.net> wrote:
>>>mrob...@att.net <mrob...@att.net> wrote:
>>>> [0] If your customer service inspires your customers to visit your
>>>> premises with a hammer and start smashing things, this should be
>>>> some kind of hint.
>>>
>>>... Especially if it results in a substantial improvement to the
>>>quality of service.
>>
>> "Knowing where to smash with the hammer .............. $2000"
>
> Why am I reminded of "I'll pound your balls flat with a wooden mallet"?
>
Too many years as a sysadmin?

--
Stevo st...@madcelt.org

Seebs

unread,
Jan 4, 2011, 8:32:40 PM1/4/11
to
On 2011-01-05, Richard Gadsden <ric...@gadsden.name> wrote:
> On 03/01/2011 02:42, Seebs wrote:
>> <nelson>ha ha</nelson>

> OK, I give up. EXPN?

There's a character in the Simpsons TV show, named "Nelson", whose running
joke is that when something horrible happens, he points and says "ha ha" in
a distinctive way. Generally applicable to any circumstance in which others
are suffering and you do not share in their suffering.

Alan J Rosenthal

unread,
Jan 4, 2011, 9:03:30 PM1/4/11
to
TimC <tcon...@rather.puzzling.no-spam-accepted-here.org> writes:
[consumer-level ISP]
>"interesting" DNS behaviour

I find it bizarre how lousy the DNS service from typical home-oriented ISPs
is. It really isn't hard to run a caching resolver. I suspect that they use
buggy and slow DNS software for ideological reasons.

It boggles the mind, and "a boggled mind is of no use to anyone". (loose quote)

Fortunately, there are public DNS servers out there. The fact that using
a DNS server out over the big bad internet can be an improvement on DNS
servers on your ISP's internal network is severe evidence of lossage.

Garrett Wollman

unread,
Jan 4, 2011, 10:07:59 PM1/4/11
to
In article <slrnii7cjl.lpp...@guild.seebs.net>,

Seebs <usenet...@seebs.net> wrote:
>Ahh, but:
>
>% ls R*d*n*\ G*rst
>ls: No match.

There is a solution to this conundrum which, unusually for such
things, is cheap, simple, and *correct*.

David Cameron Staples

unread,
Jan 4, 2011, 10:40:41 PM1/4/11
to
Over the last few days, world+dog wrote:
> R*d*n* G*rst

OK, I give up.

Who in $DEITY's name are you all talking about?

--
David Cameron Staples | staples AT unimelb DOT edu DOT au
Melbourne University | ITS | Hosting | Unix Operations
Scooby-doo. Reason enough to *never* get your pets high, especially on weed.
-- bash.org/?10992

mrob...@att.net

unread,
Jan 5, 2011, 2:07:54 AM1/5/11
to
TimC <tcon...@rather.puzzling.no-spam-accepted-here.org> wrote:
> The US phone and data system amuses me.

It hasn't been _a_ system for just a tiny bit over 27 years now. It
currently works only through the miracle of modern capitalism.

> Here, most people use ADSL, unless they're so far from civilsation
> that satellite is the only option,

One factor here is that our main campus is just about the same size as
yours, but we have around 14 or 15 times the population, and they don't
all live around the edges.

> I recently saw an advertisement from them that started to make me
> think that perhaps they had finally made their plans half decent, so I
> investigated further.

In the US, it is not possible to determine, a priori, how much you will
pay for telephone service (landline or mobile) or airline tickets. It
is only possible to guess, pay, and look at the bill later. I am sure
this applies in other countries as well, although the goods or services
it applies to may differ.

Matt Roberds

Garrett Wollman

unread,
Jan 5, 2011, 2:55:33 AM1/5/11
to
In article <ig15ca$37e$1...@news.eternal-september.org>, <mrob...@att.net> wrote:

>In the US, it is not possible to determine, a priori, how much you will
>pay for telephone service (landline or mobile) or airline tickets. It
>is only possible to guess, pay, and look at the bill later. I am sure
>this applies in other countries as well, although the goods or services
>it applies to may differ.

I believe most countries require that the advertised price be the
actual price you are charged. (They do the same thing for sales
taxes.) We only do that at the gas pump.[1] (Shows where our
priorities are, I suppose.)

-GAWollman

[1] In fact, there are all sorts of incredibly strict laws governing
how filling stations and their suppliers can operate, above and beyond
the tax thing. For example, it is illegal in some states for stations
(or distributors) to change the price of any grade of fuel more than
once per twenty-four hours.

David Cameron Staples

unread,
Jan 5, 2011, 2:58:02 AM1/5/11
to
On Wed, 05 Jan 2011 07:07:54 +0000, mroberds wrote:

> TimC <tcon...@rather.puzzling.no-spam-accepted-here.org> wrote:
>> The US phone and data system amuses me.
>
> It hasn't been _a_ system for just a tiny bit over 27 years now. It
> currently works only through the miracle of modern capitalism.

"Miracle" in that no-one knows how it works, everyone who knows anything
about it is astonished that it works, and the more you know about it, the
deeper your certainty that it shouldn't work at all, and the only
remaining explanation for why it works is supernatural forces.

Garrett Wollman

unread,
Jan 5, 2011, 3:16:18 AM1/5/11
to
In article <ig15ca$37e$1...@news.eternal-september.org>,
<mrob...@att.net> wrote:
>In the US, it is not possible to determine, a priori, how much you will
>pay for telephone service (landline or mobile) or airline tickets.

Having pondered this assertion more, it is not true for airline
tickets. Most fare engines will tell you exactly what the total bill
comes to and what fraction of that constitutes taxes -- of which there
are four: transportation tax (ad valorem on the fare), security tax
($2.50 per departure), flight segment tax ($3.70 per segment), and
passenger facility charge. The PFC is collected by each departure
airport, so it's also known in advance but different for every route;
there's a national limit on how much the PFC can be and what it can be
spent on. The FAA gets the segment tax, the TSA gets the security
tax[1], and I think the transportation excise tax just goes into
general government coffers.[2]

The airline advertisements, on the other hand, are intended to
deceive, and leave all of the taxes unstated. Unlike retail sales
taxes, organizations which are normally exempt from taxation are not
exempt from paying any of these taxes.

-GAWollman

[1] Referred to, somewhat disingenuously, as the "September 11th
Security Fee".

[2] Well, it all -- except for the PFC -- ends up in the Treasury.
The difference is that the agencies with dedicated taxes can spend
these funds on authorized activities without an explicit annual
appropriation.

Tony Kemp

unread,
Jan 5, 2011, 4:13:31 AM1/5/11
to
On 2011-01-05, David Cameron Staples <sta...@unimelb.edu.au.NOSPAM> wrote:
> Over the last few days, world+dog wrote:
>> R*d*n* G*rst
>
> OK, I give up.
>
> Who in $DEITY's name are you all talking about?

Substitute the first two *s with 'o', the second two with 'a'.

She was a spammer a few years back.

Tony.

Kristof Provost

unread,
Jan 5, 2011, 6:57:26 AM1/5/11
to
On 2011-01-04, Seebs <usenet...@seebs.net> wrote:
> Ahh, but:
>
> % ls R*d*n*\ G*rst
> ls: No match.
>
> I continue to maintain that this is possibly one of the most misleading
> error messages I've ever seen. However, I have now seen a worse one;
> a buggy perl build script which was invoked by make, and thus chose
> to emit the message: "make: No rule to make target 'foo'" when the perl
> script failed.
>
> Not the most frustrating debugging experience I've ever had, but certainly
> a contender.
I know the feeling. The very same thing happened to me recently
(although the culprit was a shell script).

It is beyond my understanding why someone would think this is a good
idea. It's somehow worse that this particular atrocity was perpetrated
by someone who really should know better.

Kristof

Alexander Schreiber

unread,
Jan 5, 2011, 6:55:24 AM1/5/11
to
Alan J Rosenthal <fl...@dgp.toronto.edu> wrote:
> TimC <tcon...@rather.puzzling.no-spam-accepted-here.org> writes:
> [consumer-level ISP]
>>"interesting" DNS behaviour
>
> I find it bizarre how lousy the DNS service from typical home-oriented ISPs
> is. It really isn't hard to run a caching resolver. I suspect that they use
> buggy and slow DNS software for ideological reasons.

Never noticed anything of the sort. But then, I've been running my own
local caching resolver ever since I had to rely on @ISPs for
connectivity. It isn't exactly hard ...

> Fortunately, there are public DNS servers out there. The fact that using
> a DNS server out over the big bad internet can be an improvement on DNS
> servers on your ISP's internal network is severe evidence of lossage.

Why would one need a caching resolver outside ones home network to begin
with? I prefer to only rely on $ISP for connectivity and prefer to
handly everything else (DNS, mail, web proxies, ...) myself. The less
of their services I use, the less they can annoy me by screwing it up.

Kind regards,
Alex.
--
"Opportunity is missed by most people because it is dressed in overalls and
looks like work." -- Thomas A. Edison

mikea

unread,
Jan 5, 2011, 8:34:21 AM1/5/11
to
Tony Kemp <tony...@googleemailservice.com> wrote in <slrnii8dhq.2...@hex.unseen.ac.am>:

She also took pics of herself in her undies, some of which were on one
of her puters when it got pwn3d and the contents thereof made rather
more public than she had expected. She's not quite in the "mirrors turn
green and curl at their edges" category. Not *quite*.

--
From RFC 1925: "(3) With sufficient thrust, pigs fly just fine. However,
this is not necessarily a good idea. It is hard to be sure where they are
going to land, and it could be dangerous sitting under them as they fly
overhead."

Graham Reed

unread,
Jan 5, 2011, 1:48:23 PM1/5/11
to
Kristof Provost <kri...@sigsegv.be> writes:
> It is beyond my understanding why someone would think this is a good
> idea. It's somehow worse that this particular atrocity was perpetrated
> by someone who really should know better.

There's still GNU code generating:

cd foo; do-something

to put in Makefile.in. Heck, last I looked, the GNU make manual
recommended that idiom.

I guess 'cd' never fails for them....

--
"I'd be quite in favour of a military takeover of that benighted city,
except that I _like_ the military and wouldn't want to stick them with
it." -- AdB, about Toronto

Seebs

unread,
Jan 5, 2011, 4:18:49 PM1/5/11
to
On 2011-01-05, Graham Reed <gr...@pobox.com> wrote:
> There's still GNU code generating:

> cd foo; do-something

> to put in Makefile.in. Heck, last I looked, the GNU make manual
> recommended that idiom.

I have had pretty good luck with checking the GNU manuals for
recommendations, then using them as a review checklist to make sure
I didn't do any of them. I am now obliged to say that I have encountered
a coding standard worse than the GNU coding standards, but only the one,
and I've seen a LOT of bad coding standards over the years.

Shmuel Metz

unread,
Jan 4, 2011, 8:35:18 PM1/4/11
to
In <slrnii76cb....@marie.beverly.kleinbus.org>, on 01/04/2011
at 10:04 PM, Ignatios Souvatzis <u50...@beverly.kleinbus.org>
said:

>There's nothing wrong with her image,

Ipana.

--
Shmuel (Seymour J.) Metz <http://patriot.net/~shmuel> ISO position
Reply to domain Patriot dot net user shmuel+bspfh to contact me.
We don't care. We don't have to care, we're Congress.
(S877: The Shut up and Eat Your spam act of 2003)

Shmuel Metz

unread,
Jan 5, 2011, 5:07:04 PM1/5/11
to
In <4d23e836$1...@news.unimelb.edu.au>, on 01/05/2011
at 03:40 AM, David Cameron Staples <sta...@unimelb.edu.au.NOSPAM>
said:

>Who in $DEITY's name are you all talking about?

A spammer whom I think of as "Bucky Beaver"[1]. See, e.g.,
http://deekoo.net/peeves/spam/spammers/premiere/TheStory.htm.

[1] A really disgusting thought just occurred to me, about which
the less said the better, although Freud had it first.

SteveD

unread,
Jan 5, 2011, 8:08:22 PM1/5/11
to
On Tue, 4 Jan 2011 22:14:18 +0000 (UTC), Roger Burton West
<roger+a...@nospam.firedrake.org> wrote:

>The more television is produced, the more second- and third-raters will
>get into the business, and the lower the quality of any individual
>programme is likely to be.

However, the more likely it is that experienced training and custom tools
will be available at cheaper cost.


-SteveD

SteveD

unread,
Jan 5, 2011, 8:14:25 PM1/5/11
to
On Wed, 5 Jan 2011 07:55:33 +0000 (UTC), wol...@bimajority.org (Garrett
Wollman) wrote:

>I believe most countries require that the advertised price be the
>actual price you are charged.

It's on my ever-growing list of things to implement should the US ever
suffer a collective stroke and install me as supreme ruler for more than
sixty seconds.

Currently there are 109 things on the list to do immediately and a further
eight in the event that the country is so shell-shocked it accidentally
re-elects me.


-SteveD

TimC

unread,
Jan 5, 2011, 8:07:18 PM1/5/11
to
On 2011-01-05, Graham Reed (aka Bruce)
was almost, but not quite, entirely unlike tea:

> There's still GNU code generating:
>
> cd foo; do-something
>
> to put in Makefile.in. Heck, last I looked, the GNU make manual
> recommended that idiom.
>
> I guess 'cd' never fails for them....

Most university researchers-cum-sysadmins I've come across don't
bother with any forms of error checking. Heck, they don't bother
putting #! lines at the top of their scripts. Everyone uses tcsh,
right?

Never mind, our ex-sysadmin who unfortunately, for stupid political
reasons (are there any other kind?) still has root access, has plenty
of scripts lying around the place (usually backup scripts that backup
over to the top of some long-dead 2GB tape, I guess). Some of these
scripts are still possibly invoked by rogue cronjobs (think I've
removed them all), others ready to be invoked if he thinks he's
helping, and none of them error check anything. But mostly cd. Onto
aging external disks. Not a problem, the rm -rf that follows should
stop after it's crossed onto all the cross mounted nfs mounts.

--
TimC
Kibo makes baby cheeses cry. -- pete

John F. Eldredge

unread,
Jan 5, 2011, 10:55:59 PM1/5/11
to

When I was an undergraduate (in the late 1970s), we were required to
attend "convocation" once a week, where some notable speaker would
address the students. Sometimes this was interesting, sometimes not. On
one occasion, a manager from a local TV station spoke. During the
question and answer session afterwards, I asked him what his network
considered to be their average viewer. His answer was surprisingly frank.

He said that they considered the average viewer to be a man in his mid-
thirties with an eighth-grade education, an IQ of about 70, working in a
blue-collar job, and not wanting to watch anything that would make him
have to think.

Unfortunately, at this point, I can't remember which network was
involved, but this certainly seems to be the demographic that a great
many television shows are still targeting, most notably the "reality"
shows.

--
John F. Eldredge -- jo...@jfeldredge.com
"Reserve your right to think, for even to think wrongly
is better than not to think at all." -- Hypatia of Alexandria

mrob...@att.net

unread,
Jan 5, 2011, 11:02:01 PM1/5/11
to
Garrett Wollman <wol...@bimajority.org> wrote:
> In article <ig15ca$37e$1...@news.eternal-september.org>,
> <mrob...@att.net> wrote:
>> In the US, it is not possible to determine, a priori, how much you
>> will pay for telephone service (landline or mobile) or airline
>> tickets.
>
> Having pondered this assertion more, it is not true for airline
> tickets. Most fare engines will tell you exactly what the total bill
> comes to and what fraction of that constitutes taxes

After several years of third-party efforts, they can do this. The last
time I looked, some of them still had disclaimers that they may be off
by a few dollars.

I'm sure that the ability of the fare engines to accurately estimate
the fares, thereby allowing some degree of comparison between offerings,
has *nothing at all* to do with one well-known airline's stated desire
to remove itself wholly or partially from such systems. (I'm sure they
already have CAPTCHAs or something similar ready to go to prevent
automated screen-scraping of their site.)

Matt Roberds

Garrett Wollman

unread,
Jan 6, 2011, 12:06:39 AM1/6/11
to
In article <8oksqf...@mid.individual.net>,

John F. Eldredge <jo...@jfeldredge.com> wrote:

>He said that they considered the average viewer to be a man in his mid-
>thirties with an eighth-grade education, an IQ of about 70, working in a
>blue-collar job, and not wanting to watch anything that would make him
>have to think.
>
>Unfortunately, at this point, I can't remember which network was
>involved, but this certainly seems to be the demographic that a great
>many television shows are still targeting, most notably the "reality"
>shows.

You might think so, but television has become far, far more niched
than even fifteen years ago, never mind thirty.

There are two "money demos": women aged 25 to 54, and men 18 to 34.
Most of the nation's purchasing power is in the hands of the former,
and the latter buy beer and trucks. People 55 and older[1] are
considered by Madison Avenue to be undesirable because their habits
are set and it costs much more to get them to change brands of
consumer products. (On the other hand, men 55+ are the prime demo for
talk radio, and you can tell by the advertising there: quack nostrums,
hair transplants, investment scams, legal but unethical ways to screw
mom's nursing home so that you can inherit her assets, lawyers of all
stripes, get-out-of-debt scams, prostate pills, and luxury cars are
added to the mix.)

-GAWollman

[1] Less than a quarter of the population, according to 2008 Census
estimates.

Garrett Wollman

unread,
Jan 6, 2011, 12:23:20 AM1/6/11
to
In article <ig3erp$9q1$1...@news.eternal-september.org>,
<mrob...@att.net> wrote:
>Garrett Wollman <wol...@bimajority.org> wrote:

>> Having pondered this assertion more, it is not true for airline
>> tickets. Most fare engines will tell you exactly what the total bill
>> comes to and what fraction of that constitutes taxes
>
>After several years of third-party efforts, they can do this. The last
>time I looked, some of them still had disclaimers that they may be off
>by a few dollars.

I don't know why that would be, since their prices come directly out
of the same global distribution systems as the airlines themselves use
to price fares. On the other hand, fare computation is known to be
NP-hard.... Many of the airlines use the same software to price their
own tickets (that ensures they aren't "leaving money on the table" by
calculating a different fare from what they publish to the GDS).

>I'm sure that the ability of the fare engines to accurately estimate
>the fares, thereby allowing some degree of comparison between offerings,
>has *nothing at all* to do with one well-known airline's stated desire
>to remove itself wholly or partially from such systems. (I'm sure they
>already have CAPTCHAs or something similar ready to go to prevent
>automated screen-scraping of their site.)

WN publish their fares like everyone else -- they just don't put them
into the GDS platforms that the other airlines use. Never seen a
CAPTCHA on their site for fare computation; their fare and route
structure is so simple it seems unlikely that they need it. They
figure that there is a population willing to fly cattle-class to save
a buck, and in any head-to-head comparison on a route they actually
want to serve[1], those people will gravitate to them.

Many of my former colleagues have gone to work for ITA Software, a
company which makes one of the more popular fare engines, QPX.
There's a free public demo at matrix.itasoftware.com; it's what I
usually use to price my travel before I set to cursing the airline Web
sites for making it so much more difficult to find the exact same
flight as the one I found in the demo. I have no idea what Google's
plans for this service are (they bought ITA last year), or if they'll
force me to let them spy on me if I want to continue using it.

-GAWollman

[1] There are lots of routes that they technically can do in their
network but either will not ticket or intentionally overprice, to
keep seats open for their regular line-haul customers.

Joe Thompson

unread,
Jan 6, 2011, 1:06:25 AM1/6/11
to
On 2011-01-06, Garrett Wollman <wol...@bimajority.org> wrote:
> People 55 and older[1] are
> considered by Madison Avenue to be undesirable because their habits
> are set and it costs much more to get them to change brands of
> consumer products.
>
> [1] Less than a quarter of the population, according to 2008 Census
> estimates.

iAs our population ages, I wonder at what point the increasing
proportion of over-55s will outweigh the difficulty in reaching them.
-- Joe
--
Joe Thompson -
E-mail addresses in headers are valid. | http://www.orion-com.com/
"...the FDA takes a dim view of exploding pharmaceuticals..." -- Derek Lowe

Garrett Wollman

unread,
Jan 6, 2011, 1:31:02 AM1/6/11
to
In article <ig3m51$per$1...@xen1.xcski.com>,

Joe Thompson <sp...@orion-com.com> wrote:
>iAs our population ages, I wonder at what point the increasing
>proportion of over-55s will outweigh the difficulty in reaching them.

I hope I never live to see the day when the median age passes 55.

The over-55s control a disproportionate share of the wealth in the
U.S., so there's plenty of economic incentives on the part of
marketeers to figure out how to reach them. As this population
becomes more dominated by (stereotypically) self-centered Boomers
rather than other-focused G.I. and Silent Generation types, they may
become more responsive to advertising (since most advertising is about
flattery). I have no doubt that this would have happened had it not
been for the real-estate crash, but so many older Boomers had all of
their net wealth tied up in inflated home prices, whereas their
parents at the same age had paid off their mortgages. (My maternal
grandmother, bless her, still lives in the bungalow my grandfather
bought in 1953, where they raised ten children. They paid off their
$20,000 mortgage in the early 1980s, while they still had wage
income.) The Boomers have also in general failed to save adequately
for their declining years, and Social Security can't cover the
difference. (And I have no doubt that they will use their political
clout to tax their children into penury so they can maintain their
lifestyles.)

-GAWollman

mrob...@att.net

unread,
Jan 6, 2011, 2:13:10 AM1/6/11
to
Garrett Wollman <wol...@bimajority.org> wrote:
> In article <ig3erp$9q1$1...@news.eternal-september.org>,
> <mrob...@att.net> wrote:
>
>> I'm sure that the ability of the fare engines to accurately estimate
>> the fares, thereby allowing some degree of comparison between
>> offerings, has *nothing at all* to do with one well-known airline's
>> stated desire to remove itself wholly or partially from such systems.
>
> WN publish their fares like everyone else -- they just don't put them
> into the GDS platforms that the other airlines use.

Not that one; as far as I know, they have always done their own thing
with their tickets. I'm talking about an American airline that is in
the GDS now - they helped *invent* them lo these many years ago, and
then made them a little eaasier to use - but that now wants to get out
and sell direct.

> Many of my former colleagues have gone to work for ITA Software, a
> company which makes one of the more popular fare engines, QPX.

I've been playing with the demo a little; of course they turn all the
features on but I like the "time bars" display, and the "long layover"
and "you might sleep in the airport" icons.

I used to know the magic thingy to append to the URL for Hafas (it only
knows trains, but it knows *all* the trains, at least in Yurp) to get it
to spit out plain ASCII but I can't find it at the moment. IIRC it
still had this ability less than a year ago.

Matt Roberds

Maarten Wiltink

unread,
Jan 6, 2011, 4:30:40 AM1/6/11
to
"SteveD" <use...@vo.id.au> wrote in message
news:3e5ai69ck276511cu...@4ax.com...

So now the rare second-raters left will be training the training-
resistant third-raters, instead of contributing to the programmes?

I don't _want_ entertainment produced by third-raters with the best
machines money can buy, damn it.

Tebrgwrf,
Maarten Wiltink


Brian Kantor

unread,
Jan 6, 2011, 11:25:26 AM1/6/11
to
<mrob...@att.net> wrote:
>already have CAPTCHAs or something similar ready to go to prevent
>automated screen-scraping of their site.)

Largely ineffective these days; you can have batches of CAPTCHAs
interpreted for mere pennies apiece under contract with various
shady firms located in the less-Western areas of the world, where
labor is incredibly cheap. Probably right down the road from the
place that is under contract to type in your private medical and
financial records.
- Brian

Message has been deleted

Alexander Schreiber

unread,
Jan 6, 2011, 2:50:51 PM1/6/11
to
Satya <sat...@satyaonline.cjb.net> wrote:

> On 06 Jan 2011 16:25:26 GMT, Brian Kantor wrote:
>> Largely ineffective these days; you can have batches of CAPTCHAs
>> interpreted for mere pennies apiece under contract with various
>> shady firms located in the less-Western areas of the world, where
>> labor is incredibly cheap. Probably right down the road from the
>> place that is under contract to type in your private medical and
>> financial records.
>
> Or the same place. Or AWS MechTurk.

Oh yes, a rather large fraction of the jobs offered for $very_small_num
looks rather shady, to put it mildly: captcha interpreting, account
creation, ... including some things that look like straight spam data
collection and/or scams (stressing that "real" data is needed ... hmmm,
I wonder why).

Shmuel Metz

unread,
Jan 6, 2011, 7:54:27 AM1/6/11
to
In <ui5ai61gdvpenotkv...@4ax.com>, on 01/06/2011

at 09:14 AM, SteveD <use...@vo.id.au> said:

>It's on my ever-growing list of things to implement should the US
>ever suffer a collective stroke and install me as supreme ruler for
>more than sixty seconds.

Assuming that as supreme ruler you continued using the best Congress
money can buy for scut work, how about decreeing truth in legislation?
E.g., a bill called an &foo control act could not prevent states from
imposing more stringent penalties on &foo, remove existing rights to
private action, etc.; a bill called truth in &bar could not enumerate
cases in which it was permissible to lie; a bill called &baz must deal
with &baz, not with insurance that purports to pay for &baz.

SteveD

unread,
Jan 7, 2011, 10:41:33 PM1/7/11
to
On Thu, 06 Jan 2011 07:54:27 -0500, Shmuel (Seymour J.) Metz
<spam...@library.lspace.org.invalid> wrote:

>In <ui5ai61gdvpenotkv...@4ax.com>, on 01/06/2011
> at 09:14 AM, SteveD <use...@vo.id.au> said:
>
>>It's on my ever-growing list of things to implement should the US
>>ever suffer a collective stroke and install me as supreme ruler for
>>more than sixty seconds.
>
>Assuming that as supreme ruler you continued using the best Congress
>money can buy for scut work, how about decreeing truth in legislation?
>E.g., a bill called an &foo control act could not prevent states from
>imposing more stringent penalties on &foo, remove existing rights to
>private action, etc.; a bill called truth in &bar could not enumerate
>cases in which it was permissible to lie; a bill called &baz must deal
>with &baz, not with insurance that purports to pay for &baz.

Hmm... *rummage rummage*

"LAWS ABOUT GOVERNMENT PROCESS
...
- Additions to proposed legislation which are outside the scope or main
thrust of the original legislation must be submitted as a separate bill -
they can and should be immediately discarded from the original bill
without process. People abusing the legislative process by submitting
multiple examples of scope-bait may be restricted from submitting further
bills for a period."

Not quite the same thing, but in the ballpark.

How about "Proposed laws may not have emotionally or politically loaded
titles, on penalty of being renamed with a numeric designator." ?

As for using Congress, I'm not really into political backrubbing and
consensus-building. I'd be more likely to rig a single sitting, ram
through all the changes in one go [1], and then ignore the political and
corporate screaming for the next three to four years.


-SteveD

[1] Possibly with the exception of stuff which needed modification to the
US Constitution, although it'd be nice to take care of everything in the
one go.

Richard Gadsden

unread,
Jan 8, 2011, 7:03:00 PM1/8/11
to
On 08/01/2011 03:41, SteveD wrote:
> - Additions to proposed legislation which are outside the scope or main
> thrust of the original legislation must be submitted as a separate bill -
> they can and should be immediately discarded from the original bill
> without process. People abusing the legislative process by submitting
> multiple examples of scope-bait may be restricted from submitting further
> bills for a period."

Hmmm, we actually have that in the Mother of Parliaments.

It's called "long title". All Bills must have a long title. No
amendment is in order if it does not fall into the long title.

Typical example:

"An Act to restrict membership of the House of Lords by virtue of a
hereditary peerage; to make related provision about disqualifications
for voting at elections to, and for membership of, the House of Commons;
and for connected purposes."

--
Richard Gadsden ric...@gadsden.name
"I disagree with what you say but I will defend to
the death your right to say it" - Attributed to Voltaire

Joe Zeff

unread,
Jan 8, 2011, 8:01:13 PM1/8/11
to
On Sun, 09 Jan 2011 00:03:00 +0000, Richard Gadsden wrote:

> "An Act to restrict membership of the House of Lords by virtue of a
> hereditary peerage; to make related provision about disqualifications
> for voting at elections to, and for membership of, the House of Commons;
> and for connected purposes."

Just out of curiosity, how far can "...for connected purposes." be
stretched?

--
Joe Zeff -- The Guy With The Sideburns:
http://www.zeff.us http://www.lasfs.info
Sometimes when you fill a vacuum it still sucks.

Sam Trenholme

unread,
Jan 8, 2011, 8:29:58 PM1/8/11
to
>So far, my approximately 1 year of C*mc*st service [0] has not gone as
>well as my approximately 8 years of C*x service.

I myself have been using C*mc*st for the last three months or so. So
far, I had one major outage. They came in with my landlord while I was
working and replaced the modem the next day. But, of course, they
didn't bother to set up said modem [1].

So, when I went home, I discovered the internet was not working. So,
from my Linux box, I went to the Comcast web page to fix it [2]. Which
got me to a "Sorry you can not set up your modem in Linux" web page.

Good thing I haven't wiped my Windows 7 partition yet. So, yes, I had
to boot in to Windows and install a bunch of C*mc*st's crapware on to my
Windows partition (which I almost never use; it's a WiFi router and my
household Usenet server) just to use my C*mc*st router (which, to be
fair, the did replace the next day).

I know C*mc*st is going to fail again. That's why I run my own Usenet
server on the network to have a local store of articles to read so I
have something to pass the time with while the internet is down. Heck,
I can even post offline and have the posted articles go upstream once
I'm online again.

- Sam

[1] Well, OK, the fact that all of my computers are password-protected
may have something to do with it. Also, I wouldn't have felt
comfortable giving $random_cxmcxst_employee my password with me there
because the GRUB prompt would probably have confused them too much.

[2] Once I configured things to use the DNS server their DHCP server
told me to use instead of my own resolver, since it was set up to direct
everything to an IP with a "set up your modem" page.

--
My email address is at http://samiam.org/mailme.php

Garrett Wollman

unread,
Jan 8, 2011, 9:26:03 PM1/8/11
to
In article <GtGdnaHlNMGsZrXQ...@giganews.com>,

Richard Gadsden <ric...@gadsden.name> wrote:
>On 08/01/2011 03:41, SteveD wrote:
>> - Additions to proposed legislation which are outside the scope or main
>> thrust of the original legislation must be submitted as a separate bill -
>> they can and should be immediately discarded from the original bill
>> without process. People abusing the legislative process by submitting
>> multiple examples of scope-bait may be restricted from submitting further
>> bills for a period."
>
>Hmmm, we actually have that in the Mother of Parliaments.
>
>It's called "long title". All Bills must have a long title. No
>amendment is in order if it does not fall into the long title.

The U.S. House of Representatives has such a germaneness rule as well.
However, because most bills today are considered under special
procedures (either suspension of the rules or under a special rule),
it rarely ever applies. (A special rule will identify the specific
amendments which may be considered, and explicitly waive points of
order against them.) There is also a rule against authorizing in an
appropriations bill, which again is more often waived than observed.

Of course, in order to enforce such a rule in the form that you
describe, you would also have to restrict amendment of the long title
itself, and you'd also have to prohibit catch-all language in the
title, like the (standard here) "and for other purposes".

The Senate has no such rules; any Senator may offer any amendment for
any purpose on any bill properly before the Senate, subject only to
the Constitutional restriction that money bills must originate in the
House. Note that it does not specify that the bill was a money bill
when it left the House, or indeed that it have had anything to do with
what the Senate does with it; it may come back to the House having
only the enacting clause in common with the original. (So the usual
practice is for the Senate to hold back a number of House bills that
might otherwise pass, simply as a vehicle to send their appropriations
back to the House. They'll probably not be able to do so this
Congress.)

Chloe

unread,
Jan 9, 2011, 4:46:01 AM1/9/11
to
On Sun, 9 Jan 2011 01:29:58 +0000 (UTC), Sam Trenholme
<sam-u...@samiam.org> wrote:
> [1] Well, OK, the fact that all of my computers are password-protected
> may have something to do with it. Also, I wouldn't have felt
> comfortable giving $random_cxmcxst_employee my password with me there
> because the GRUB prompt would probably have confused them too much.
>

I just had a business cable modem from Virgin fitted, and because all my
machines were busy, they checked the modem/registered it from their own
laptop.

All I had to do to make it work with my system (still haven't built the
router for it, 3 months later!) was power cycle it and plug in anything that
wanted an IP.

I hate to say they were being sensible, but I gues they were.

Chloe

Sam Trenholme

unread,
Jan 9, 2011, 5:39:49 AM1/9/11
to
>All I had to do to make it work with my system (still haven't built the
>router for it, 3 months later!) was power cycle it and plug in anything that
>wanted an IP.

The impression I got talking to C*mc*st's support is that they really
don't want me disconnecting and connecting computers from the cable
modem box; bad things may happen if I do that too much. Indeed, the
fact that I kept switching between laptops with the old cable modem box
may had something to do with the fact it failed.

So, these days, the only thing I connect to the cable modem is a $250
netbook running 64-bit Linux (yes, the newer netbooks have 64-bit),
which gives everything else in the house wi-fi. The biggest annoyance
is that the wifi card in the netbook doesn't have "access point" support
in Linux, so I have to enter the password on the Windows 7 clients every
time I log in. Maybe if I swap its Broadcom card out with an Atheros
AR9285 I have around...

The nice thing about using a really cheap PC as the router is that it
can do a lot of cool things an OpenWRT router can't do, such as serve
Usenet.

Richard Gadsden

unread,
Jan 9, 2011, 6:31:32 AM1/9/11
to
On 09/01/2011 01:01, Joe Zeff wrote:
> On Sun, 09 Jan 2011 00:03:00 +0000, Richard Gadsden wrote:
>
>> "An Act to restrict membership of the House of Lords by virtue of a
>> hereditary peerage; to make related provision about disqualifications
>> for voting at elections to, and for membership of, the House of Commons;
>> and for connected purposes."
>
> Just out of curiosity, how far can "...for connected purposes." be
> stretched?
>
Depends on the rest of the long title. Big catch-all Bills (Education
Bill, Criminal Justice Bill) can be amended to cover just about anything
in that department, most other Bills have a specific purpose and tend to
stick to it.

The earmark-type amendments pretty much never occur, but that's more to
do with the differences in the control of spending (much more in the
hands of the Treasury, much less in the hands of the legislature in the
first place).

Shmuel Metz

unread,
Jan 9, 2011, 8:23:37 AM1/9/11
to
In <igb6br$2pcg$1...@grapevine.csail.mit.edu>, on 01/09/2011

at 02:26 AM, wol...@bimajority.org (Garrett Wollman) said:

>They'll probably not be able to do so this Congress.)

But only because there is a Democratic majority in the Senate. If the
Republican's controlled both houses it would be business as usual.
There are many bad behaviors that are bipartisan. It's too bad that
there don't seem to be any good behaviors that are bipartisan.

mrob...@att.net

unread,
Jan 11, 2011, 1:27:03 AM1/11/11
to
Sam Trenholme <sam-u...@samiam.org> wrote:

[Where did the attribution line go?]

>> So far, my approximately 1 year of C*mc*st service [0] has not gone
>> as well as my approximately 8 years of C*x service.
>
> I myself have been using C*mc*st for the last three months or so. So
> far, I had one major outage. They came in with my landlord while I
> was working and replaced the modem the next day. But, of course, they
> didn't bother to set up said modem [1].

IIRC the C*mc*st guy set it up using his laptop, as I told him that I
only have penguins. The tech made a note that "set up on laptop, cust
has Lenox [sic] operating system" on the work order. I didn't pay close
attention to what he was doing.

> So, when I went home, I discovered the internet was not working. So,
> from my Linux box, I went to the Comcast web page to fix it [2].
> Which got me to a "Sorry you can not set up your modem in Linux" web
> page.

Sometimes you can get around those by telling your browser to send $UI
instead of what it usually sends. Of course if the other end's next
step is to push a CraptiveX widget at you, this won't work, but it
works often enough to be interesting.

The only other setup thing I recall doing myself is that by default,
C*mc*st has decided that when you mistype a URL, you don't really want a
"host not found" page, you want a page full of ads. I had to turn that
off.

Matt Roberds

[1] NMF
[2] NMF

Garrett Wollman

unread,
Jan 11, 2011, 1:58:14 AM1/11/11
to
In article <iggt7n$s5q$1...@news.eternal-september.org>,
<mrob...@att.net> wrote:

>The only other setup thing I recall doing myself is that by default,
>C*mc*st has decided that when you mistype a URL, you don't really want a
>"host not found" page, you want a page full of ads. I had to turn that
>off.

I am given to understand, from fairly high up in said company, that
this bug will be fixed, permanently, later this year (and about time,
too).

Sam Trenholme

unread,
Jan 11, 2011, 3:00:31 AM1/11/11
to
>The only other setup thing I recall doing myself is that by default,
>C*mc*st has decided that when you mistype a URL, you don't really want a
>"host not found" page, you want a page full of ads. I had to turn that
>off.

There's a reason why I also run a DNS server on my wireless
router/Leafnode usenet feed Linux 64-bit netbook.

This was complicated by the fact that the Ubuntu abomination called
"NetworkManager" tries to insist I should only use the DNS servers my
upstream provider tells me I should use. I beat NetworkManager in to
shape by editing the binary to write to "/etc/resolv.mngr" instead of
"/etc/resolv.conf".

- Sam

--
#Sam Trenholme http://samiam.org -- Usenet user since September 1993#
######## My email address is at http://samiam.org/mailme.php ########
# The following script works around an annoyance in the Nano Editor #
cat | awk '{a=a $0 "\n";if($0 ~ /[a-zA-Z0-9]/){printf("%s",a);a=""}}'

Message has been deleted

Maarten Wiltink

unread,
Jan 11, 2011, 7:24:32 AM1/11/11
to
"Gallian" <gal...@linuxmail.org> wrote in message
news:86k4ibi...@gareth.avalon.lan...

> [...] What's going to be next? Flying pigs?

Been done. Still needs a wire to hang from, but it flaps its wings and
goes in circles (there's a moral there somewhere).

Tebrgwrf,
Maarten Wiltink


Sam Trenholme

unread,
Jan 11, 2011, 12:25:47 PM1/11/11
to
>Editing the binary is overkill. Bragging about it does not impress,
>considering that said setting is easily changed. More would be UI.
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

No, said setting is not easily changed.

Before resorting to changing the binary, I read the man page [1], looked
at all of the documents in /usr/share/doc/network-manager, did a Google
search or two, and played around with network settings in Gnome's GUI.
I didn't find anything about changing the DNS servers if I use DHCP to
get my IP.

Now, you claim this is "easily changed". OK, fair enough. Tell us
exactly how it is done.

- Sam

[1] Not there is much of one.

Brian Kantor

unread,
Jan 11, 2011, 12:36:44 PM1/11/11
to
Sam Trenholme <sam-reads...@samiam.org> wrote:
>I read the man page [1]
>[1] Not there is much of one.

Ah, the famous "I didn't like man pages so I built an interactive info system
that contains only obsolete man pages with a note about how some wonderous day
real info will magically appear in this other incompatable system" that Linux
sports these days.

Type "info <quux>" to get the same man page as you get with "man <quux>" only
more slowly and more dependent upon terminal formatting, which of course always
works especially over a serial console server port.

Add to that the "no one would want to use that so I'll take it out" feature sets
and you have only the barest inkling of why I hate Linux nearly as much as I
hate Windows. Note that these are largely the same reasons.
- Brian

Joe Thompson

unread,
Jan 11, 2011, 12:52:55 PM1/11/11
to
On 2011-01-11, Brian Kantor <br...@ucsd.edu> wrote:
> Sam Trenholme <sam-reads...@samiam.org> wrote:
>>I read the man page [1]
>>[1] Not there is much of one.
>
> Ah, the famous "I didn't like man pages so I built an interactive info system
> that contains only obsolete man pages with a note about how some wonderous day
> real info will magically appear in this other incompatable system" that Linux
> sports these days.

I think this largely only applies to Debian derivatives that are not
Ubuntu derivatives. Red Hat has always had real man pages, and so has
Ubuntu in my experience. -- Joe

Joe Thompson

unread,
Jan 11, 2011, 12:59:15 PM1/11/11
to
On 2011-01-11, Sam Trenholme <sam-reads...@samiam.org> wrote:
> Before resorting to changing the binary, I read the man page [1], looked
> at all of the documents in /usr/share/doc/network-manager, did a Google
> search or two, and played around with network settings in Gnome's GUI.
> I didn't find anything about changing the DNS servers if I use DHCP to
> get my IP.
>
> Now, you claim this is "easily changed". OK, fair enough. Tell us
> exactly how it is done.

You're asking, here, for UI. Consider that for a moment.

Having said that, exploration of the GUI interface as well as the right
phrases in your favorite Internet ad-impression engine will give you at
least two correct answers. -- Joe

Sam Trenholme

unread,
Jan 11, 2011, 1:10:23 PM1/11/11
to
>Ah, the famous "I didn't like man pages so I built an interactive info system
>that contains only obsolete man pages with a note about how some wonderous day
>real info will magically appear in this other incompatable system" that Linux
>sports these days.

I think the whole "don't use 'man', use 'info'" thinking comes from the
GNU movement that decided long long ago in a galaxy far far away that
"man" was obsolete and that everyone should use info instead. It was
one of GNU's more silly moves, especially since they started putting
annoying "this man page is obsolete" messages in their man pages.

GNU Bash, thankfully, never fell to this curse and has always had a
full, comprehensive man page. However, some non-GNU projects have a
*really* bad case of "Man pages? What man pages?". Yes, SVN, I am
looking at you.

I actually have some Perl scripts that convert a modified subset of HTML
in to *ROFF man pages (as well as plain text and real HTML) which I have
used for my own little open source projects. Allows me to make a HTML
page, a *ROFF man page, and a text document from the same file.

- Sam

Joe Zeff

unread,
Jan 11, 2011, 1:13:09 PM1/11/11
to
On Tue, 11 Jan 2011 08:00:31 +0000, Sam Trenholme wrote:

> This was complicated by the fact that the Ubuntu abomination called
> "NetworkManager" tries to insist I should only use the DNS servers my
> upstream provider tells me I should use. I beat NetworkManager in to
> shape by editing the binary to write to "/etc/resolv.mngr" instead of
> "/etc/resolv.conf".

What makes you think it's Ubuntu-specific? I have NotworkMangler, and I
use Gangster Hat. There's an easy way to beat it into permanent
submission, but it would be UI. Details available by email.

--
Joe Zeff -- The Guy With The Sideburns:
http://www.zeff.us http://www.lasfs.info

Think of it as evolution in action.

Message has been deleted

mikea

unread,
Jan 11, 2011, 1:49:01 PM1/11/11
to
Gallian <gal...@linuxmail.org> wrote in <86fwszi...@gareth.avalon.lan>:

> Sam Trenholme <sam-reads...@samiam.org> writes:
>
>>>Editing the binary is overkill. Bragging about it does not impress,
>>>considering that said setting is easily changed. More would be UI.
>> ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
>>
>> No, said setting is not easily changed.
>>
>> Before resorting to changing the binary, I read the man page [1], looked
>> at all of the documents in /usr/share/doc/network-manager, did a Google
>> search or two, and played around with network settings in Gnome's GUI.
>> I didn't find anything about changing the DNS servers if I use DHCP to
>> get my IP.
>>
>> Now, you claim this is "easily changed". OK, fair enough. Tell us
>> exactly how it is done.
>>
> Apart from you asking for UI, what makes you think I was going to do
> your homework for you?

Affirmati Non Neganti Incumbit Probatio. Verbum sat sapientibus.

Who said it was ork-related, anyway?

--
Keep the Acetone close by. Recently I had to open, walk through, and close my
front door, walk about 400 feet from the house to the workshop, get out a key,
unlock a garage door, find the Acetone, open it, and unstick my fingers all the
while with several fingers of both hands stuck to a 5 pound capacitor.

Sam Trenholme

unread,
Jan 11, 2011, 1:50:12 PM1/11/11
to
>I think this largely only applies to Debian derivatives that are not
>Ubuntu derivatives. Red Hat has always had real man pages, and so has
>Ubuntu in my experience. -- Joe

Well, not for a lot of newer programs. The issue with the
NetworkManager man page was one on Ubuntu 10.04 LTS. This man page does
not have basic information like the fact that /etc/dhcp3/dhclient.conf
is a configuration file used by this program.

That is a serious omission. I call this kind of documentation many
things, "serious man page" not being one of them.

- Sam

Joe Thompson

unread,
Jan 11, 2011, 2:02:11 PM1/11/11
to
On 2011-01-11, Sam Trenholme <sam-reads...@samiam.org> wrote:
>>I think this largely only applies to Debian derivatives that are not
>>Ubuntu derivatives. Red Hat has always had real man pages, and so has
>>Ubuntu in my experience. -- Joe
>
> Well, not for a lot of newer programs. The issue with the
> NetworkManager man page was one on Ubuntu 10.04 LTS. This man page does
> not have basic information like the fact that /etc/dhcp3/dhclient.conf
> is a configuration file used by this program.

Said file is not read by NetworkManager at all, so it's not explicitly
germane to the NM man page. That said, I notice the necessary info to
know that it's relevant was added to said page in 10.10. -- Joe

Sam Trenholme

unread,
Jan 11, 2011, 2:05:34 PM1/11/11
to
>what makes you think I was going to do your homework for you?

Let's replay the sequence of events:

* I pointed out that Network manangler was such a pain in the butt that
I had to change the binary to beat it in to shape.

* You flamed me, implying I was an idiot for not doing it the unstated
"correct way"

* I asked you to prove there was a better way to do it, detailing my
process of trying to deal with Network manangler.

* You flame me again.

So, an open question for other regulars here: Is gal...@linuxmail.org
a known troublemaker who I should just put in my killfile? Or did he
just wake up on the wrong side of the bed this morning?

- Sam

mikea

unread,
Jan 11, 2011, 2:12:31 PM1/11/11
to
Sam Trenholme <sam-reads...@samiam.org> wrote in <igi9m0$bn5$1...@Milagro.leafnode.foo>:

>>what makes you think I was going to do your homework for you?
>
> Let's replay the sequence of events:
>
> * I pointed out that Network manangler was such a pain in the butt that
> I had to change the binary to beat it in to shape.
>
> * You flamed me, implying I was an idiot for not doing it the unstated
> "correct way"
>
> * I asked you to prove there was a better way to do it, detailing my
> process of trying to deal with Network manangler.
>
> * You flame me again.
>
> So, an open question for other regulars here: Is gal...@linuxmail.org
> a known troublemaker who I should just put in my killfile? Or did he
> just wake up on the wrong side of the bed this morning?

My view is shown in the Latin in my previous responses. OTOH, if those
were his very best flames, then this applies:

At the moment you couldn't flame your way out of a bag of stoichiometric
oxy-acetylene mix.

--
[T]he claim that brits drink warm beer because we have Lucas
refrigerators is a myth.
-- Tanuki the Raccoon-dog, in asr

Sam Trenholme

unread,
Jan 11, 2011, 2:49:52 PM1/11/11
to
>My view is shown in the Latin in my previous responses.

Ragvraqb. Zr cnerpr dhr ry rf ha qrfneebyynqbe qr AZ cbedhr ry fr
chfb rabwnqb phnaqb qvwr dhr AZ rf pnpn. Ab ren zv vagrapvba
ynfgvzneyb; qvfphycn.

- Samuel

Message has been deleted

Joe Zeff

unread,
Jan 11, 2011, 3:12:08 PM1/11/11
to
On Tue, 11 Jan 2011 19:05:34 +0000, Sam Trenholme wrote:

> Or did he
> just wake up on the wrong side of the bed this morning?

You mean there's a *right* side of the bed? Learn something new every
day.

--
Joe Zeff -- The Guy With The Sideburns:
http://www.zeff.us http://www.lasfs.info

This is going to sound strange in here, but not everyone is a luser.

Erwan David

unread,
Jan 11, 2011, 3:21:16 PM1/11/11
to
Joe Zeff <the.guy.with....@lasfs.info> disait le 01/11/11 que :

> On Tue, 11 Jan 2011 19:05:34 +0000, Sam Trenholme wrote:
>
>> Or did he
>> just wake up on the wrong side of the bed this morning?
>
> You mean there's a *right* side of the bed? Learn something new every
> day.

Yes there a right side. But which one is right depends wether you look
from headboard or footboard.

--
Le travail n'est pas une bonne chose. Si ça l'était,
les riches l'auraient accaparé

It is loading more messages.
0 new messages