Oks... that's mean ticalc.org is cleaning the house

I can belive! That is my (and the) first Post!?

Yup.

But to make things really clear, if they were not. We are NOT going to be removing any accounts. They will all automatically reactivate as soon as the users verify the email address. We realise there are a lot of people who don't log in very often, and we don't want to remove their ability to use the site.

,but... what is the point of all of this?

The only point I see is that if they (or somebody else) need to contact you about a program or whatever, then they'll know they have the right address.

Allright, I was about to say that this whole thing's not so bad, but just my luck... I first had to verify before putting up this post. So... here are my thoughts on the system:
-Its annoying to have to wait to click the little button, then wait for the email to be delivered, then wait for it to be retrived, then click the little back button and wait for the little form to load so I can input my huge number.
-All of the submission forms are SLOW AS HECK (yeah, its true I use dialup, but thats still no excuse for a two min. wait for a form to submit!!)

Allright, the point of this all; yes it is slow and annoying, but its not really bad or anything, and I must commend ticalc on a fairly ingenious and non-intrusive system to clean up all of the accounts! Good job (but its still annoying. Of course, this system could potentially speed things up by clearing out old and dead accounts...) Anyway, its still annoying.

People still use dialup!?...People still live like that!?
Trust me with a Cable modem its not such a hassle, really you get bored with a Cable modem, so it gave me something to do for a minute.
Anyways, sorry for those of you who had to wait for the form. And congrats to Ticalc for the cleaning process.

Yes, but Cable is also much more expensive.

My DSL line costs me around $50/month for a block of 5 IPs and unlimited data transfer

Not everyone can *afford* a cable modem.

Yeah, 56K really sux, but I can't seem to talk my parents into getting high-bandwidth;
As for you, Joel Smith, where I live cable is only like $45 to $55 a month, but DSL is $50 for a dynamic IP, $60 for 1 static, and $5 extra per IP. So, no, cable really isnt more expensive (though its no better either, since DSL offers dedicated bandwith).

Anyway, I wish I had SONET (Synchronous Optical Network). It goes up to 10 GIGAbits per second [note: thats faster than a T3]. They use it for the Internet backbone. (Like anyone could afford THAT, although I'm sure Bill Gates probably has it.)

I meant that Cable is much more expensive than dialup.

I'd like Cable instead of DSL...but it's not in my area..by stupid ISP blocks ports 21 and 80. Suck. Stupid people.

Why is that a bad thing? If you're talking about running a web/ftp server, you can usually configure what ports they work on.

well, typing "ftp://xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx" is much easier than typing "ftp://xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx : 33208"

Plus, I had to test a whole bunch of them before I found one that wasn't blocked. They're blocking quite a few...

Oh, yeah. My bad... Yeah, DSL and Cable are way too high. If it was only like, say, $30 a month, that would be nice. And more people would probably get it too, thus increasing profits (although decreasing bandwidth...) But anyway, at least I get free dialup from my dads work, so its all good. (pay $30 for AOL dialup? HaHaHa... the fools!).

Wow, I could not imagine going back to the 56k world. For the past few years I have been at college (and in the dorms) so I have had wonderfully fast internet access. For me downloading a DivX from someone that has good speed I can get about 700mb in 1.5 - 2 hours. The max speed I have ever gotten here on campus is 2mb/sec (yes thats 2 megabytes a second), needless to say, the guy whom I got 2mb a sec to gave me perm access to his ftp and I did the same :).

Anyways, back to the discussion of internet connections. This summer I am moving out of the dorms (finally) and getting an appartment. I basically have three choices for broadband, ADSL, Wireless (802.11b) and 1-Way cable (56k upstream, cable downstream). ADSL is what I will likely go with, it is only $40 a month with no installation fees, so it is not that bad. Wireless is $50 a month, but only 1 megabit per second max, and coverage is spotty. The single way cable thing would suck nuts, but it is also $40... from what I hear their downstream kicks ass thou.

At home I finally convinced my parents to go with Road Runner cable (now $45 a month). I've heard some people really bashing RR but for me it has had around a 95% uptime, and great speeds. At home I have downloaded Linux ISOs (around 700 meg) in just a hour or so. I have seen peeks in transfers up to 900k/s (9 megabits) and sustained transfers have (a max sustained transfer rate) at around 750k/s. I think on day to day use though it averages 300k/s.

If you dont have other broadband solutions in your area there is always 2-way satalite. I haven't checked into it much, but I imagine that lag would suck for games, but downloads could be fast. So, if you are in a rural area in the US get your mommy and daddy to get you dual way satalite ;).

BTW, I have a question, what is the average age of the Ticalc.org user? If I were to guess I would say middleish highschool... 10-11 graders? I also wonder what the varience is.... Personally I got into the scene back in early highschool and sorta stuck around... getting a little sick of some of the childish crap though.

I'm a college freshman.

I was in sixth grade when I entered the calculator world. Currently, I am in eight grade. I tried to bring my sister in when she was in fourth grade, and she was in to it for a little while, but she soon got over it.

School finally got internet when I was in upper sixth (18 / 19 ) and I joined up.
One and a bit years has passed and I am now still 19.
And why is everyone paying for internet access. You can get it for free from Uni.
And if you can't get enterprising and stop pestering your poor oldies.

I work at 14400 at home and I am happy. 56K modem was too unreliable on our phone lines.

I had problems with unreliable 56k, too...

*click*.. "Goodbye"

I don't miss AOL at all...

T3 *is* SONET. SONET comes at a lot of different speeds...

Not only is a cable internet connection much more expensive, it also is not available everywhere - I would have cable if the stupid cable company would stop sitting on thier thumbs and get it available in my area. Instead I'm stuck with 56k over phone lines that will only transmit at about 2-4k at best.

Isn't the max that phone lines in the U.S. can go about 54 kbit/s?

Also, notice that 56kbps is only 7 KByte/s. 2-4 KBPS is actually not that bad; it's about equal to 28.8 KBPS. My hometown's phone lines never go faster than that.

Yep, that sounds right. The most I ever got on dialup was 4kbytes/sec.

I got 6 Kilobytes per sec once!!! For about 3 secs, though.

My parents are divorced and live in seperate homes not even 20 minutes from each other.

At my dad's home, I regularly connect at 112.2 kBaud over phone lines. I have tested this to be sure that I am not getting erroneous readings, and I found that I can transfer 2 files at about 5 kB/sec, but if I am only doing one, the max is also 5 kB/sec. I timed files of known sizes to get these figures.

Anyway, at my mom's home, I can only connect at 28.8 kBaud. The max file transfer speed I can get there is 3 kB/sec if I am lucky. I am _very_ frustrated by this because my mom has custody (mostly) until I am 18, so I am over there ~95% of the time. Anyway, this baffles me because as far as I know, they use the same phone company through the same routers/switchers, and yet one connection is ~4X the other.

WOW! THAT'S AMAZING! I've gotten times when I've been down to 227 bytes. BYTES! THAT'S SLOW! I've had amazing times when I got 3kb/sec, but that's rare. I wonder how people download movies illegally onto CDs off the internet. I imagine that would take days, estimating how much space they could take up!

>I wonder how people download movies illegally onto CDs off the internet. I imagine that would take days, estimating how much space they could take up!

2-3 hours :). It really depends on where your getting it. I downloaded 3 disk images - around 2 gigs - to Debian Linux in around 10 hours because the site I was getting it from had a fast connection. When I downloaded 2 disk images for RedHat 7.2 - about 1.2 gigs - it took 15-16 hours because I didn't use a mirror, and redhat's FTP was really crowded.

You pay for your bandwith though...

Up here at Michigan Tech, it's only $18/month for T1 access. Quite a deal. I download movies sometimes; they're about 500-700 megs each, and they take 4-5 hours on average (from good sources).

I've been dissapointed with DiVX movies. Sure, it's a good compression, but if the people who ripped them made them around 2-3 gigs each they'd have much better quality. Of course, people want them to fit on a CD-R.

Whatever. One day someone will clue in that Kazaa allows you to trade stuff like that and do something about it.

$18/month for T1 is great. I'm one of those lucky people who only has Dialup/very expensive DSL in their area. Cable would go faster for about 10 dollars cheaper/month - but I get nice upload speeds cause my line is Symmetrical..it's worth it.

DivX is good enough, in my opinion. It's better to download 50-60 movies than to BUY them, especially if they're the sort that you'd watch once and regret buying (like "Dude, Where's My Car?"). Besides, after you open the package on a DVD, you usually can't return them to the store. Download a DivX movie, watch it, then burn it to keep it or delete it if it sucked. Ta-da; $15-$30 saved.


Officially, KaZaa was shut down months ago, but (just like Napster) it keeps running on servers that aren't owned by the people who wrote the software.

Stop using KaZaa. Use Direct Connect: http://www.neo-modus.com/

I'd rather watch a high-quality DVD rented from Blockbuster (3 minute drive from my house) for $4 than wait 2-6 hours for a lower-quality movie that someone did a bad job ripping. I don't really buy DVD movies - The Matrix and Gladiator are exceptions - they're too expensive. Just rent 'em.

I haven't used Kazaa in a long time - just LimeWire. No-one stays up on LimeWire long enough to download a full movie - I just updated to their latest release for Linux though; maybe this will change.

I will try Direct-Connect.

Hey, someone who knows... isn't Limewire spyware? In other words, doesn't it collect information (sometimes important or private) from your computer and send it back to their databases? Or am I mistaken?

I know that SwapNut is...

=/. I hope not. Even if it is, they wouldn't get a whole lot of useful information from my computer.

Limewire does have spyware ad components, but you can refuse to install them.

Wow... the servers know if a comment has been posted twice. Nice.

Yeah, the perl scripts on this site are really nice.

Do they use Perl or SQL? Anybody know? Or both, maybe?

Does that include full bandwidth upstream, or just downstream? I often wonder what all the universities with fat pipes are doing with their upstream, when it seems that the majority of the bandwidth usage would be downstream.

Lots of people run FTP servers off of their "fat pipe" bandwith at university. The guy I get most of my MP3s from is running his server off a college T1.

I can upload at up to 55KB/s and download up to 300KB/s. That's kilobytes, not kilobits.

WOW! That's fast! Ticalc is really slow on our comp because it is so popular.

Yeah, that's exactly right, but everyone in the immediatly surounding towns can get around 5K, While mine actually averages 2K.

I hear ya, I get about 300kb/sec on my suckie cable modem. I used to my dad's T1 but he kicked me out of his office.

Some of us happened to pick the absolute worst location possible for broadband, aka Tempe, Arizona, where neither DSL nor cable modems are available, and the only viable alternative, Sprint Broadband, is prohibited by the evil apartment management (Alliance Residential Company). Should you ever be looking for an apartment in the southwest, I strongly suggest not getting one owned by them.

... They can legally prohibit you from using an internet service... How?

The service requires a small tranceiver (see URL for this post) to be placed on the roof of the apartment. Mounting it on my balcony is not an option due to the direction that it must face. Even though the can be mounted under the overhang, will not be visible and would be installed by a professional from Sprint, they will lot allow it. Yes, they suck. Do not get an apartment owned by them, for this and many other reasons. I have had MUCH better service with my previous two apartments. For the last six months, Cox has been claiming that the cable upgrades in my area would be finished Q4 of 2001. Now they are claiming "any day now". I recently gave in and ordered their Cox Express service, which is cable download with modem upload (so I have pay for the internet service, the modem rental and a phone line from Qwest, the evil corporation of evil corporations). The service is very unreliable. Their DNS servers failed so often that I was forced to run my own (dnscache from djbdns) to get any reliability.

I see. That makes perfect sense, except one thing: Micro$oft is the evil corporation of evil corporations.

No. They don't intentionally screw over customers. See www.tsewq.com (Qwest backwards) for some very interesting information about them. Microsoft actually has decent customer service and listens to their customers. Qwest has none. Qwest has been fined several times for intentionally billing people incorrectly. They "slam" their own customers, meaning change their long distance provider. This can mean being charged $50 a month just for using that provider, whether or not you make any long distance calls. They intentionally target minorities that will have difficulty fighting it. They sell information about you like what numbers you call and for how long you call them, to anyone who will buy it.

Try calling Qwest because they billed you incorrectly. You will wait at least an hour on the phone, and then you finally talk to an actual person, you get shuffled between departments, and if you are very lucky, will talk to someone who will have the power to help you. Of course, the actaul problem will take months to get resolved.

With most companies, if they have poor service, you can go somewhere else. Where are you going to go when it's THE phone company? That's right, nowhere. You're just screwed.

Microsoft is a monopoly and they use their power to monopolize other industries. Qwest is a monopoly and uses their power to screw people over.

Put Microsoft into perspective with companies like Qwest and Monsanto. Then they won't look so bad.

>No. They don't intentionally screw over customers
Well, maybe not intentionally. :)

I have Qwest DSL with a Local ISP. I had to stop using their Qwest.net as an ISP and switch to a local one because they were billing me as a buisiness because I was networking multiple computers. WTF?!.

On my monthly bill, there is a $30 charge from Qwest for only God knows what. It's been there for months. I'm not paying it. They say that they'll take it off, but so far, the have not.

Wow. I had no idea.

My comment was basically a bitch about Microsoft's monopolistic tendencies.

maybe you just aren't in the wright nayberhood for dsl or kabel. I think yu hav 2 b lik a 1/4 mile away from the server to get dsl.

That is an incredibly annoying way of talking on the internet... it's not even attempting to be correct. BAAAAHHH!

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/V\3 +00. |5n'+ |+ 50 h4rc| +0 unc|3r5+4nc|?
vv00+|
^

w00t. ^_^

w00t! ^_^

How did you do a double reply?

I have a dial-up modem.

It took me about half a second. I don't know why it took you two minutes...

Hey, whatever works; right? I always complain about poorly optimized web sites that take forever. Ticalc is a little bit slower because of all of the fourms and such, but its a well-built site for sure.

(P.S., in my world, 2min = 20secs. It just feels like 2 mins! :P)

Why not update hosting site? tezxas.ticalc.org is not yet mentioned in "More about hosting"

here's my problem: i transfered the ion, ionz and zminfo files to my ti83 calc. I'm sure i transfered the right files caus' they end with *.83p. Now, I ran the ion file and it says: Error: Memory. Here's the part that baffles me: I have 27.8kb free (which I'm sure is enough). It persists to give me this error. I reset the ram multiple times but to no avail. The program spits out the same message....

PLZ HELP!

What ever happened to the archives? They haven't put up my files that I submitted weeks ago! There wasn't anything bad in them!

I sent in stuff before December which still hasn't been loaded.