Thermocouple Problem...

I went to an IEC meeting in Beijing in 1990 and it was available in the Holiday Inn restaurant.

--
Regards, John Woodgate, OOO - Own Opinions Only.
There are two sides to every question, except
'What is a Moebius strip?'
http://www.jmwa.demon.co.uk Also see http://www.isce.org.uk

For example, I used the high speed connections right at the main high-rise telco office in central Kunming (a fair-sized city and provincial capital)-- plenty fast for local sites such I'm familiar with such as elong or Google China (these were demos for selling ADSL to locals), but extremely slow to essentially non functional (half an hour and the home page had not loaded) for *some* Western sites that I use often. Some DNS problems as well. This problem does not exist a mere two hours flight away in Hong Kong or up in Beijing. It might be possible to improve things radically by using a proxy, I'm told. It appears to be some kind of technical issue, I had no problems with my usual news sites (Reuters, CNN, NYT, Bloomberg, London FT, etc.) Internet cafes used by locals are typically uncontrolled (you don't have to show photo ID like you would typically have to in North America, just hand over a bit of money and sit down with 100 other people, many of the males chain-smoking, and mostly playing online games, chatting, watching movies and doing other time-wasting entertainment stuff.

The foreigner's residence building (a high-rise) on the campus is set up for ADSL and cable modems don't seem to be an option. Dial-up (ugh) would be, but I'm not sure what options are available for ISPs. I used a business center dial-up last time that was acceptably fast, but of course business centers grossly overcharge for their services (about

30 times the going rate outside-- 1Y per minute vs. 2Y per hour). Another I used this time (ADSL) was identical in problems but 30:1 in price.

My secure webmail works about as badly with text-only or with frames and graphics-- part of the problem seems to be related to the secure connection rather than the raw amount of information transfer. It hasn't gotten much better in this area of the country from a couple of years ago, so I don't think it's just a temporary glitch-- there really are some issues with the high speed connections from "there" to "here".

Maybe NSA's computers are faster at breaking the encryption than the Chinese government ones. ;-)

Thanks!

Best regards, Spehro Pefhany

--
"it's the network..."                          "The Journey is the reward"
speff@interlog.com             Info for manufacturers: http://www.trexon.com
Embedded software/hardware/analog  Info for designers:  http://www.speff.com

In article , Spehro Pefhany wrote: [...]

... or: The Chinese have to pick the lock and the NSA already has a key.

[....]

The world owuld be a lot safer if everyone used "pine" for their e-mail.

--
--
kensmith@rahul.net   forging knowledge