> Now I don't want to be seen to be supporting Juno's terms of service,
> but you do have a choice:
>
> Either you live with the conflict, or you find a different ISP.
Very true. Unfortunately, alot of the free-isp's are going out of business.
Near where I live (near Seattle...), there's still a big "For Lease" sign on
the free-inet building. Sigh... But, I guess we can't blame Juno for
trying to maximize it's revenue in new, creative ways, while still offering
"free" Internet service.
On a weird side-note, has anyone else noticed that alot of those free
services actually use the same dialup lines? I guess that's one way to cut
costs... outsource your dialups to someone else who can maximize their
investment by having multiple free-net customers on their modem banks.
> Did you try changing the priority of Netmeeting, or at least its
> codec thread? The problem may well be that, to avoid VC running away
> with system resources & making the whole system unresponsive, it
> could run its codec thread at idle priority. In this case it would be
> unable to get CPU resources until the prime service expires its time
> allocation, but might then have to give up its own time slot early
> pending the availability of data to process. Result, Netmeeting runs
> slowly. If I'm right about this, then another application requiring
> access to the video would operate normally even whilst Netmeeting is
> crawling. If you were to raise the priority of the Netmeeting codec
> thread to one above the prime service, the problem would go away.
> But DON'T go above 4, you might start to impact your control of the
> system through the console!
I'm sure it's something like that. Next time I do a vidconf, I'll find
which thread it's running under and give it a boost. Now where did I put
that copy of PSLIST? (www.sysinternals.com)
> > So again, what happens if Juno's software starts interfering with your
> > other apps, even when your not connected?
>
> Caveat emptor. So long as you can get rid of it reasonably easily if
> you decide you want to transfer to another ISP, or even Juno's
> charged service.
While waiting for my DSL service to be hooked up following my move to WA, I
tried a variety of freenet services... Netzero ended up being the one, not
because it was the best, but simply because they all are equally annoying
and I just happened to stop with NZ.
Just proves the time tested axiom "you get what you pay for"
> > Well, electricity costs and what not are still likely to be less than
> > even the cheapest ISP on a per-month basis.
>
> Here in the UK energy is much more expensive than it is in the US. My
> local utility charges 9.40 pence per KWh net, i.e. 9.87 pence after
> applying VAT at 5%. A typical system running 24 hours per day
> consumes about 100 KWh per month, i.e. the electricity costs around
> 10 pounds.
>
> The local utility is a monopoly supplier, I have no alternative.
Most utilities in the US are "monopolies" although many are regulated to
some degree or another. Witness the horrible situation in California where
utilities were capped as to how much they could charge the end user, but the
suppliers of the electricity to the utilities were not regulated.
Electricity costs in some parts are pretty bad. Right here in the Puget
Sound area (Seattle, Tacoma, etc), there have been quite a few price hikes,
thanks to the fact that CA refuses to supply their own power and came
begging for more from us. :)
VERY fortunately, I run in a small town that supplies the power for us, and
they had the foresight to buy electricity futures at a very low price, so I
haven't seen any hikes. It's fortunate because I'd hate to see what my bill
would look like with my behemoth Compaq server (and external drive array)
and my 6 or 7 other machines all sucking up power.
On the other hand, with all those computers, I rarely needed to turn on the
heat this entire winter. :)
> To give them their due, Win 2K seems to be a lot less demanding of
> reboots following application installs than Win 9x was, though many
> installers still seem to demand system reboots following completion.
> Maybe this is as much the fault of the installer as it is of the OS.
>
> However I still fail to see why anything other than a replacement of
> the OS kernel code should require a reboot. Even loadable modules
> (DLLs) should be upgradable on a running system. Linux manages, why
> can't Windows?
"nice" applications should, of course, check if a "system" DLL already
exists, and only replace it if the version it's installing is newer. If
that DLL is in use, there's no way to replace it on the fly... which is why
many installations ask you to shut down all other programs first. Following
that sage advice can actually save you many a reboot.
On the other hand, even "nicer" applications won't install any system DLLs
and will work happily by placing the DLLs in it's own directory rather than
mucking up the system/system32 area. FWIW, Windows XP is making great
strides in trying to normalize behaviour such as this and actually does some
fancy footwork on the sly to eliminate even more reboots by even the
naughtiest installation routines. Win2K already does a good job of
preventing DLL Hell, Windows XP does even better.
So hey, at least Microsoft is paying a little bit of attention...
Aaron
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