"Good Journey West, Captain Miller"

[GAHorn]

Capt. John Miller, (QB) Eastern Airlines (ret'd), just went West at age 101, initiated the first autogyro Air Mail flight for Eastern. Here is the film made of the event.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qoyWsg6Dxno

[johneeb]

George are you sure of the date of Johnny Miller's death? I thought he died a year ago or so, I did some Googleing and found stories of his death in 2008. I don't know if the link below covers his death, it is very interesting reading.
http://frobbi.org/dcpa/JohnMiller.html

[170C]

I'm curious. Watching the interesting UTube video on Capt. Miller, every so many seconds the video freezes for a couple of seconds, then resumes. Is there something I should be doing to my computer to prevent this? That 48 minute video on Arthur Godfrey ran without a hitch

[johneeb]

I'm curious. Watching the interesting UTube video on Capt. Miller, every so many seconds the video freezes for a couple of seconds, then resumes. Is there something I should be doing to my computer to prevent this? That 48 minute video on Arthur Godfrey ran without a hitch

Frank,
In your part of Texas do you still have party lines? It is Sunday maybe someone else is using some of your band width.

[170C]

John, maybe I didn't have the string pulled taunt enough between the cans

[jrenwick]

One thing you can check is the bandwidth you're getting from your ISP. To do that, go to http://www.speedtest.net.
The download speed it shows you should be at least what the ISP told you they're giving you. If it's less, ask them why.

The other factors are not under your control, and they are the capacity of the server you're downloading from, and the current load on it from other clients. The only way I know of to get an idea of that is to try to download the same file or video at different times of the day or week. If poor performance seems to correlate with times when many people are home and playing on their computers, then you can reasonably assume the server is overloaded at those times.

Another possibility (less likely) is that the network path from the server to your ISP is experiencing some kind of bottleneck, perhaps a router or inter-ISP link somewhere that is down, or some link in your path is overloaded with traffic for some other site. To get an idea about this, as well as the load on the server you're going to, you can try pinging the remote server. To do this, do start->run, and type "cmd" in the "Open" box. That will bring up a DOS prompt window, and in that window, you can type "ping -n 100 <servername>" and hit enter. Some servers don't answer ping requests, and in that case it won't work. But if your server responds, you'll see an output line for each response. The "time" value in each response is the round-trip time to the server. If that varies by more than a few milliseconds, it could indicate congestion in the path. If it's really bad, pings will get lost and you'll see a timeout message. If this is happening, you're probably also experiencing hesitation in the downloaded video stream.

If you're seeing timeouts and lost messages often, and on many sites, ask your ISP to look at your line quality and see if they see any errors, retransmissions, or resets. DSL connections sometimes have these problems if the line isn't perfectly clean, electrically. Cable connections are shared with other users in your immediate neighborhood, so that could be an additional point of overload.

Bottom line: if problems like this are persistent, ask your ISP about it. If they don't seem to want to help, go to a different ISP -- if you have a DSL connection, you probably can choose among several ISPs (cable companies have a monopoly on IP services on the connections they sell, but phone companies don't).

[Bruce Fenstermacher]

One thing you can check is the bandwidth you're getting from your ISP.

John you might have lost 80 percent of the forum mentioning bandwidth and ISP in one sentence. You lost 19 out of the remaining 20 percent when you mentioned a DOS prompt and ping later on.

[GAHorn]

George are you sure of the date of Johnny Miller's death? I thought he died a year ago or so, I did some Googleing and found stories of his death in 2008. I don't know if the link below covers his death, it is very interesting reading.
http://frobbi.org/dcpa/JohnMiller.html

In my posting what I thought was an interesting video, I was not intending to imply it was a recent passing. (2008 is correct.)

[johneeb]

John,
I think a ping test is one of the options on http://www.speedtest.net.

[170C]

John, thanks for the suggestions. I'll see what I can come up with. And yes, as Bruce said, you lost about 90% of us--me especially, but I'll give it the old college try anyway. Thanks again

[jrenwick]

John,
I think a ping test is one of the options on http://www.speedtest.net.

Yes, but it's a ping to a "ping server," not to the site you're trying to download from. The method I suggested measures the actual server you're interested in. Their ping test is really only checking the reliability of your own ISP.

Sorry if I lost anyone. I was trying to keep it fairly non-technical. Once again, if you're having problems with your internet connection, try calling your ISP (meaning the cable company or the phone company, whoever you're buying your internet service from) and see if they can offer any help.

[dacker1]

Geez, you guys have attention deficit disorder or something?
The video was pretty cool, and guess what... when it was filmed, a "ping server" would probably have been considered the guy serving the ball in a ping pong game.

I am not sure why the autogyro didn't catch on more, it is the best of both worlds... flys much like a fixed wing, but takes off and lands like a helicopter. To fly is heavenly, but to hover is divine!
Captain Miller must have seen a lot in his 101 years.

[GAHorn]

Geez, you guys have attention deficit disorder or something?
The video was pretty cool, and guess what... when it was filmed, a "ping server" would probably have been considered the guy serving the ball in a ping pong game.

I am not sure why the autogyro didn't catch on more, it is the best of both worlds... flys much like a fixed wing, but takes off and lands like a helicopter. To fly is heavenly, but to hover is divine!
Captain Miller must have seen a lot in his 101 years.

He flew his personal Bonanza right up virtually until the day he died! What a dream!