Everything Else

i'm looking for a router replacement and i bumped into this: Mini AirPort Express line to wireless Router WiFi Express Adapter for MacBook

chinese sellers crack me up, don't know what to pick for a title:









(sources: Micro USB For Apple , iPhone Wifi Adapter Compatible iPad Macbook Air Computers )

ipad auto-speller and wordsmithery be damned, here come ze chineze zellerz. all this and brains ISO9001:2000 certification y'all!

kowalski, shoot me up twice man

Me, too Did you want one ? I have to brave the computer street again tomorrow, stupidly got a serial cable with the wrong connectors last week. If you get one it should work* for an hour or two ...

*Depending on how lax your definition of 'work' is

They speak English better than I speak Chinese.

Here. Let me help ... http://translate.google.ca/?hl=en

Now you're on the same page

Isn't google rightfully blocked in china?

Nah, they just mess with it. Google didn't hurt the feelings of the Chinese people like the idiots at the New York Times did - they just don't intend for Google to ever be a force in China. They look out for their own country .. woo-hoo ! what a concept !

The bad thing about google here is first, that they insist on redirecting you to a Chinese page. Thanks, dickwads ... No problem, just register and sign in ! Sod off, you farging barstadges.

The annoying gfw function is that you can do two or three google searches no problem, but if you do more than that your internet connection suddently slows to a crawl. If you keep on then you get the "connection reset by peer" pages and you have to leave boogle alone for a while. And they mess with the mail connections all the time, mostly through dns I think. They use the copyright Billy G Gates Method to make people go elsewhere. I think there's some Chinese blood in that boy ... ever look closely at his eyes ?

If I weren't such a stubborn bastard I wouldn't use google anymore either. As bad as boogle has become, maybe I'll drop them eventually too. Dig through thirty-eight pages of pointless lying sales sewage to find one pearl, oh goody. Kapitalism hangs itself with its own rope once again

there's a german saying that goes like «if you want to learn something, travel» (oskar could probably give us the original punchline)

i was walking around town, popped-in the café across the street and here's the answer to all questions about quality:



it's (half-)dead jim.

Does bing work there? I've been using it for years, since it was still "live" search...

Mainstream enough to be useful, but not google...

Bing works, sort of ... they insist on choosing your language for you which is not so helpful, especially when they write "English" in Chinese, so if you really wanted English you couldn't find it . It's not terrible, the Assist uses it sometimes. Kind of mediocre but at least not annoying. Ixquick must use google as a back end because it does the same thing as google. Duckduckgo is slightly better but the results aren't spectacular either. Google images are a total pain in the ass because they hit so many sites in quick succession that you get the dreaded Page Reset very quickly. And now they insist on sticking their own shit on top of the image so if you go to that page you're doubling up on google hits, which kicks you off twice as fast. Someone should write a fireflop extension to strip the google part of the url off I do it manually but by then you've used up your quota for the hour ... images was once a great tool for showing people exactly what you want but alas, not so much now. China wants us to use Baidu but I'm really not interested in Hello Kitty.

It's sort of a pain in the ass but google searches aren't very good either now, so no great loss. The other day I wanted to find out what kind of memory a 3660 uses. In the past you'd get several hits on the first page pointing to Joe Networkwizard discussing what commodity memory worked. Now, you get thirty solid pages of ads. Lots of them are advertising items they can't possibly have ... I've seen google search returns for places selling 1956 Arnolt-Bristols at the cheapest price ... sure they are. It's stoopid. Meanwhile the brilliant technologists at google can't deal with these phony advertisers. Sure. Pull the other one, it's got bells on.

Lest you think I am criticizing China, I'm not. The US is worse. At least here it is historically and culturally unacceptable to criticize the government. Everyone knows that and no one believes the propaganda. The US pretends to have free speech but let the Smothers Brothers open their mouths and kaboom, off the air ya go, bunky. Not to mention Joe McCarthy ruining dozens of peoples' lives in a witch hunt. The US just does a better job of being deceitful. The worst part is, lots of Americans actually believe that swill.

If I have to choose between crappy google searches and invading foreign countries all based on lies, guess I'll have to go with the crappy google searches ... does Germany accept refugees from fascism as immigrants ?

Anybody here see my old friend Martin ? can you tell me where he's gone ?

Regardless of how great the lyrics in that song are, musically it sucks.

You guys are crazy to use commercial routers, my router is my circa-1997 Pentium Pro, running Slackware 14, with three NICs (two ethernet and one wireless), and a modem. The winning advantage is having direct access to iptables config file which allows instantaneous droppage of any offending IP address, top of the list being the accursed akamai...

Yep, pretty boring. The absolute worst has to be "Horse With No Name" - vapid lyrics and insipid music that seems to go on forever.



Ah, but there you have the power question (along with noise, space, and risk of failing mechanics). An "embedded platform" setup (Atom, MIPS, ARM) with sufficient expansion would be a lot easier to deal with.

Thankfully the Classic Rock stations hereabout have finally quit playing that song...

Yeah, it's definitely more of a hobby than an effective solution. Actually, even with regular cleanings and fan and power supply replacements I'm kind of amazed it's still working, the thing regularly gets hundreds of days of uptime:

Innagaddadavida, baby


There is a demand for a real router (tm) that runs something like IOS but doesn't cost Cisco prices. Remember that the hardware on a Cisco is good, too. ASICs help.

If you couldn't just buy an older Cisco I'd agree with y'all but ... tempus fidgets and I ain't no spring chicken. I'd rather put the time into getting an Irix browser that doesn't crash every thirty seconds.

Geez guys I got an airport last May (last time I moved) and I haven't heard a peep out of it since. If I hadn't had a SCR lamp dimmer switch explode a few months back and trip the breaker it would have perfect uptime. Life is too short to worry about rooters and why-fis.

As a single person that often works fine ... but when you get several people on a more complicated network, many of whom are not sophisticated about what not to do on the Internet, it's not so good. In fact, the whole thing can come crashing down around your ears, usually on a Saturday afternoon when you planned to go to a party and thought you had a good chance to get some. Re-installing Windows on several computers instead of getting laid is no fun.

For just myself, I was happy with an SMC thingy I bought at Circuit City twenty years ago. But for a network with just a few people and outward-facing services and company info on the network, not so good. What woke me up from my dream was one of our guys sending out resumes looking for a job - and using our designs as samples of his work. Cool, hunh ? No joke. We call this Birth of a Network Nazi If he's going to stab us in the back at least he's going to do it from home.

There's now no USB or removable media in any office where I have a say, either I know a factory in Guangzhou with about twenty designers. Every single thing that goes to or from the Internet goes through two girls whose job it is to make sure no company data goes out. No exceptions. (Unless you pay them off, of course. Where there's a will there's a way.)


At least it's not Lionel Ritchie moaning in pain