jrm

Mentioning what economy you're getting (and how you're measuring it) would be a good start too .. (Along with driving style, how often you're in stop start, whether its long/short trips, etc .. hell, even knowing how long the car is taking to warm up is very useful information)

There are a few ISPs in Australia offering unlimited downloads, but typically only on limited exchanges. These ISPs also typically have a lower quality of network, lower-quality service/support, and over-subscribe their service to the hilt - to try and cut the costs. As for the rest of the world - not sure if you don't read the IT news websites or what ... lots of places around the globe are implementing capped internet. Comcast in the US with a 250GB cap, back in 2008: http://www.maximumpc.com/article/news/its_...h_bandwidth_cap ATT in the US followed up with their own bandwidth caps: http://www.maximumpc.com/article/news/att_...b_bandwidth_cap http://www.dailytech.com/ATT+Experiments+w...rticle13355.htm TimeWarner 40GB for $50 bandwidth caps: http://arstechnica.com/old/content/2008/06...caps-arrive.ars These are just three I can find quickly on the web. I'm not saying bandwidth caps are a good thing - I don't particularly agree with them. But users are downloading more and more, and right now with the structure of the internet - particularly in Australia - those bits of data cost real money. The ISPs do typically still get charged on a per/gb download fee for their users, and then they have to cover the costs of their own network, infrastructure, support services, etc, etc. The more bandwidth they're pushing through their network, the bigger and more capable routers they need etc. What worked 6-12 months ago may not scale up to the same capacity today. Margins in the ISP world are typically small - it's a business that I'm glad to be out of these days. I don't think internet will ever be free. What we'll probably find is a convergence between our various services - phone, media/entertainment (music/TV) & internet, offered under perhaps an access fee and a monthly content fee (or perhaps a per-download fee for the content), which is then stored locally (likely DRMd). Who knows how far away that is down the track though, 5 years? 10? We're a media and entertainment hungry society - I can imagine a situation where we'll end up with is agreements between the content/media providers content distribution networks and the end-users ISPs to essentially provide our media content for free and the rest of our internet access at a nominal rate - download limits won't mean much then because most of our content will be via local CDN nodes. We may end up probably have to pay the content/media providers a monthly access fee for the service. Think ABC iView that is offered un-metered to many ISPs. The whole face of the internet and how we get our content is changing dramatically - some companies are moving with the times and recognising how things are changing, others are falling behind.

Tormenting can easily kill low-end routers requiring a reboot. The nature of torrents is you could be potentially dealing with many thousand connections, particularly if you're running multiple torrents. With most home situations, that's going to be through a NAT translation - basically you end up doing things like overloading the NAT tables translation tables and basically toast the router till you reboot and clear it. It's probably worth investigating your options for settings within the torrent client to limit connections, or upgrading your router to something more powerful. Also, might be worth seeing about settings for uPNP and disabling that and setting up a dedicated port forward if you haven't already - this may help. Anyway, good luck with it. If you're really stuck google something like 'torrents killing router' and I'm sure you'll find other users with the same issue and suggestions on fixes depending on your router type, etc.

Wholeheartedly agree that distance from the exchange, and the providers on the exchange really define what providers you can be with natively, and your overall performance expectations. I'm not sure I agree with the assertion that capping on the internet is not going to last much longer, however. Given where Australia is in the grand scheme of the internet, our distances, cabling costs, etc, I think we're always going to have some limitations around our internet usage. Also consider how many providers in the states are now starting to put limits around their users usage. The reality is that internet costs money, and as content sizes are increasing the infrastructure of the internet has to grow to support it - and the internet was never really designed with this sort of structure in mind. This is why more and more sites are moving towards a distributed architecture (essentially, CDN-based technology) - to provide redundancy & get the content closer to the user. Having all of a particular sites data come into a central hub basically doesn't scale. You end up putting all your eggs into one basket, and then relying on the underlying telcos having sufficient capacity to carry that data from you to users. By pushing your content closer to the edge (and the more sites that you distribute the content the better), you're going to provide a better user experience (throughput over a single TCP session is directly related to latency). I can talk about this stuff all day - it's my bread and butter really (I've been working in a mix of the ISP/Telco/Hosting industry for well over a decade).

Wow, sounds like an AA meeting confession or something .. haha .. Yeah, there's a guy down at my local service station who has mentioned he has a modified skyline, we've chatted about cars some. When I've mentioned SAU, he doesn't seem to have much interest; I got the impression he didn't really use the web (more into cars than playing around on those silly computers..) As much as computers/internet is definitely more mainstream than it used to be, lots of people still don't really use it. (Makes me feel real old to consider I've been online for over 15 years..)

Also consider you're going to get a bias of IT people on here given it's an online forum ... I do find it interesting to see the sheer mix of IT people though - their different skill-sets, roles, etc.

My line only syncs at 7mbps - too far from the damn exchange - but it's been pretty much flat-lined since I cut-over .. It's a good thing I have a huge RAID array, huh? LOL

As per http://www.iinet.net.au/broadband/plans.html & http://www.iinet.net.au/business/broadband/plans.html For residential users, $129.90 - which includes cutting your regular phone line across to iinet (which will probably save you money anyway). For business users, $165.90 with the above phone line proviso. As a note, naked dsl plans don't have a 1TB option as yet. Even their lower down plans are pretty decent for one of the better quality ISPs (in terms of service, support, and their network infrastructure). I tend to recommend people stick with iinet/internode if they can. There are definitely cheaper ISP options out there (think TPG), but they have a poor history in Australia for their network, service, quality, etc.

For me, I'm actually saving $15/mo on what I was getting previously (and then I was only getting 150gb/mo). Main differences from my old plan: i) Uploads & downloads are counted as 'usage' ii) Split of the 1TB between 500GB peak/500GB off-peak However, I did the math and even if I max. my outbound the entire month, that's less then 150gb/mo... and ultimately, I'm still saving $15/mo for more downloads - so it's hard to go wrong. As for performance - it's iinet, their network is one of the best in the country. Hasn't changed from my old plan.

Oh iiNet .. I you.... I'm now on a 1TB/mo plan .. woo

Spotted very stock-looking (stock ride-height, exhaust, etc) silver R34 sedan in the Hindmarsh Medical Clinic carpark today about 5pm .. really made me appreciate the subtle mods mine has.

I know I sat in the dealers sales offices on the phone to Shannons organizing my insurance before it I even drove it off the lot.... The other thing is - those without an alarm almost certainly lack comprehensive insurance - because almost all of the insurers require an Australian standards alarm (3-point, black wiring, etc). Horrible situation, you end up with burnt out skylines, and it pushes up premiums for the rest of us. Do we need to be organizing some sort of group deal with Auto Perfection to get SAU:SA a deal for Autowatch alarms installed or something?

worn engine/trans mounts?

Check the lid of the airbox and see if it still has the sound-deadening thing in it; I know on my R34 there was this 10x15cm sorta padding thing in the lid which is there to sound-deaden induction noise.

I'm sure Dr.Bolt could too - that guy is pretty awesome.

Suggestion - site just seems to have lost it's CSS file or something; Maybe you could fix? Edit - and now that I post, it seems to have fixed itself! ... Boy the site was horrible for those 5mins

Hey - if this is the same as the R34 Neo ones - I have one - I just lent it out to RubyRS4 - you're welcome to it next if you want.

You should have my payment already; Is it worth posting an updated list showing who has/hasn't paid?

The temp gauge in the standard cluster is water temp - and its pretty much a 'cold' 'normal' 'hot' type - it doesnt give much more than that. Anything from about 65C -> 95C and it'll sit in the middle on 'normal'. What people have already said is that an AF gauge with the standard narrow band o2 is near useless - the way it produces voltages, it only really knows about 'lean' 'stoichiometric' and 'rich' - you won't really get any useful information out of it. If it were me, I'd probably go water temp, oil temp, and maybe vacuum. You should have oil pressure in the standard gauge cluster already. To be honest, it's a lot of money and expense for gauges that aren't really going to be all that useful unless you're taking the car out on the track.

Do you have an aftermarket steering wheel?

wow, another one

It's really not that difficult a conversion. My partner and I did mine in a few hours. Even made up a nice loom to seperate out the wires going to the 3 gauge cluster (with the right plug to go straight in) then one set of wires (with a nice easy plug) to the ECU, then another set (also with a plug) for the other set of wires - a few going down to the stereo area for illumination, battery, ign, and one wire going across to the speedo area for water temps. Came out real neat, with heatshrink, etc - I'm happy with it. Easy to return it back to factory, and nice and neat for removal for servicing, etc. The way things should be done.

Don't suppose you're separating the intake temperature (should be on the intercooler) and exhaust temp sensors - these are only used by the MFD - so if you've removed that ... should be available?

You just wanna perve in better quality

I currently just have each of the 3x2TB hooked up via eSATA cables and constantly connected. I have them told to power down when they're not in use to try and minimise their run times. I currently do a full back up once a week. Given how little most of the data changes in the course of a week - I haven't bothered with anything special. I should probably just modify my code to do differential backups and do it daily, but I'm lazy. What's there works. I *could* disconnect the drives once the backup is complete and throw them in a safe, but I don't have one. Something I'd love if I could find one at not too stupid a cost. 100% agree on avoiding any sort of software-based/ICH raid; Pretty much anything you find on motherboards should be avoided - hence why I (and others) have suggested PERC/5i or PERC/6i - these are reasonably cheap cards that perform well. Only drama with them is you need to add a bigger heatsink (costs about $20ea). With regards to the drives themselves, whilst I do agree on some level about enterprise drives, for a home situation - with RAID - I don't think it's entirely necessary. Just make sure you buy from a reputable brand and avoid the 'green' type drives that really aren't designed to be on 24/7 in RAID configurations (these are well known to drop out of even proper hardware RAID causing corruptions). Really, for performance, I think you're not gonna find any issues with consumer grade drives either. With 8 x 1.5TB in RAID50 I'm getting an easy 300-350MB/s read performance, which given everything it's talking to is over 1gbps ethernet is the bottleneck rather than the disk/controller performance.