Has the Philips web site finally gone to lalaland?

The giveaway is in the URL.

Go to the Japanese Philips site and it does find AN439. So does the UK one too. But global doesn't !

Graham

It's pretty awful here using iCab 2.9.8

The first page hung around displaying nothing for about 30 seconds, then locked the browser up in an infinite loop. Cancelling the loop gave a page full of eye-candy.

A second attempt crashed the browser completely.

Perhaps it partly depends on how different browsers handle Javascript.

Hello Graham,

Yes, and sometimes you find it on the global site (I did find AN439, sometimes). Other times not. That is a problem with several EU semi sites. IMHO this is a higher level management problem.

Regards, Joerg

Hello Jim,

Same here. If it ain't broken don't fix it.

Done the same on my last PC purchase but they told me that this time I couldn't have NT5 on there anymore. On the previous one I cajoled them into the older OS. The guy taking my order seemed in utter disbelief about it. Why on earth...? Had to pay $100 extra for the privilege of rejecting Gates' latest and "greatest" :-(

When the dreaded XP croaked (again) I called Dell. A lady from a call center picked up, sounded like India. She was extremely knowledgeable. So at the end of the conversation I asked her why I was told I couldn't have NT5 on it. She explained in detail which parts of the hardware do not have any drivers other than for XP. I'd have to look up my conversation notes but it was at least two. So, depending on the HW in your machine you might be stuck with XP because there may be no other drivers for some parts in that PC.

Regards, Joerg

As a PC non-guru, I found the easiest way to try an upgrade is to buy a spare harddrive, and see if it installs on that, and works on your PC hardware. If all your application data is on another drive (fat chance?), you are sorted.

I tried this, for fun,with UBUNTU and the MacOS X crack. Ubuntu is stunning, but none of my PC apps would work :-(

martin

Microchip did something that biffs their web pages for my browser. Used to take fives of seconds after browser said "done" for a page to appear. Now it still takes fives of seconds *and* some hot links never make it. For example, when I try to search for a PIC document, a page with a kazllion PIC types and the instruction choose-a-PIC-type loads. Problem is, all of that text is just ... text. No other menu; no hot link(s). Possibly Microchip has hired a pimple-faced web master who is in love with Java (I keep Java-everything turned OFF). So anyway .. I'm reduced to Googling the PIC-type while specifying "PDF". This sorry state of affairs reminds me of how the Motorola site was several years ago.

Joerg wrote in news:St89g.16269$ snipped-for-privacy@newssvr12.news.prodigy.com:

Hello Joerg,

Just out of curiosity, what program do you use to measure latency? Most of the time the web is fine, but sometimes it seems really slow. I wonder if keeping tabs on latency would help.

There are a few sites that show worldwide internet speed but I didn't find them useful so I didn't keep the urls. They didn't seem to relate to any of the problems I was having at the time.

Regards,

Mike Monett

Hello Mike,

Good old DOS. Jot down the IP address and then enter:

ping 255.255.255.255

One instant isn't representative because routing can be different at times. However, I found that the sites of some large EU semi mfgs are consistently slower (a lot slower) than those of smaller companies that seem to know how to run it efficiently. Add to that the nonsensical fluff the marketing guys put in and a site can quickly become useless.

Regards, Joerg

Joerg wrote in news:i3u9g.86488$ snipped-for-privacy@newssvr21.news.prodigy.com:

Thanks, Joerg - when you say "IP address", I guess you mean a string of numbers separated by periods, as opposed to a text string like "

How do you convert a url into a number? (Amazing how clueless we can be and still survive:)

Regards, Mike

FYI I've tried pinging philips.com a few times and it just times out.

Cadsoft.de responds in 35ms.

Graham

You can do either.

Ummmm, I forget. This is what DNSs ( domain name servers ) are for.

Graham

Hello Mike,

Just enter the web address first. As an example, for my web site you would type:

ping

Then it comes back with the IP address for that domain. There are also "Who is" databases but I find that a brief ping is faster. A few sites may not allow others to ping them.

Regards, Joerg

Hello Graham,

Possibly they switched to dis-allowing pings. But in the past when I had problems with that site it also sometimes timed out.

That small company sure knows how to ride the web. The best is their support forum. Not some fancy, over-sophisticated and sluggish forms to fill out. Nope, they use the plain old newsgroup format and offer groups in different languages. It's wonderful and fast. It is one of the reasons why I switched to their CAD package.

Regards, Joerg

Hello Graham,

I still write down important ones. There were days when the DNS lookup at my ISP was performing like a moped with a loose spark plug. In the same way it's always good to have that dial-in number handy when broadband packs up. Or fresh batteries for the flashlight when the power goes :-)

Just ping

Regards, Joerg

Some sites are rigged to not respond to "ping".

However I tried a traceroute and gives me "Target not reached".

...Jim Thompson

Tracert gets me only part of the way there, to philips-gw.customer.alter.net .

Graham

Apparently traceroute and ping use very similar methods, just traceroute attempts to ping all the computers at every hop inbetween.

Best regards, Spehro Pefhany

No need, it looks it up automatically. Just type "ping

Another interesting program is traceroute. It tells you how many hops it takes to reach a site and which routers it goes through. Type "tracert

These two are command line utilities, you can find some Windows programs that do it in GUI. Take a look in nonags.com.

Note that some sites currently don't respond to ping requests due to abuse.

- YD.