<snip> > do you use yobbo at all? would you if others were using it? what would > you want to transfer around town for "free" if you had an unlimited > account around chch but not to the wider net?
No, I don't. IIRC the access point was visible to me, but I couldn't connect to it as I didn't have an account/password/key/whatever (and it was a while ago when I tried it). I would use it if I could figure out how to direct my network traffic easily. i.e. web browsing and mail go via my ISP, and local stuff goes via WiFry. I would transfer my weather data, useful files I had downloaded, and my mp3s (so I can listen to them at a friend's house) and photos (so I can show them at a friend's house without eating into my cap). Actually, if yobbo was like a proxy network, with a giant cache, it would be great. The first person to download Slashdot would fill the cache, then everyone in Christchurch reads it from the cache. This is one thing that annoys me about my ISP. They probably have a cache, and when I download an ISO for example, they fetch it and give it to me (and dock 700Mb off my cap), then the next guy who wants it probably gets it off the cache, but they dock 700Mb from him as well. I know that caching must be set up carefully, but sometimes I think I'm paying for something which isn't really costing anything. And I am double-plus annoyed at the moment because my cable connection goes down every 8 or 10 hours... Anyway, that would make yobbo an ISP, which they don't want to be. I think it would be a jolly good mirror for ISOs, Debian packages, and other large but static resources (maybe you could even mirror Wikipedia and other reference sites. Can't count ad revenue on a local network though...) > > The USB spec. limits the cable length to 5m, although you can buy > > active repeaters that extend this range. Either way, since the signal > > is converted to digital at the point of reception 5m of USB cable is > > effectively lossless (compared to 5m of your favourite and expensive > > coax). > > 5m, thats the info i was trying to remember while chatting to Don. He > was busy trying to splice usb plugs onto cat5 cable to make a usb > extender, seems a recipe for disaster perhaps. I expect that you could make a USB cable as long as you like, but the signals have a high clock rate so they would degrade past a certain point (that and the voltage drop). 5m might be an arbitrary limit set by the USB specification, but it is not unreasonable, and guaranteed to work. Andy
