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Your cell carrier doesn't count as an ISP for your smartphone? You don't get a publicly routable address on any cell network I've used.

At least Saunalahti in Finland offers publicly routable IPv4 addresses to their mobile customers. You have to activate the feature in the self-service portal and use the correct APN so generally only those who know what they're doing would do it, but it is all documented on their website. The feature is free of charge.

There is a utility called fetchexc that will fetch incoming mail from Exchange 2000/2003 OWA servers. It would need some updating to work with 2007, though.

http://www.saunalahti.fi/juhrauti/index.html

Many people here seem to be unaware of the lack of Wi-Fi hotspot coverage in Europe. And I didn't even mention the word free. In Finland, the Wi-Fi coverage is very spotty, unless you buy a subscription for unlimited service (and even these services are usually available only in limited areas). The advantage of 3G-based mobile broadband is that it covers a huge area, nearly the whole country (there are still many problematic areas, though). So you can you use the connection nearly everywhere and you don't have to worry finding a Wi-Fi hotspot when you want to check you email etc.

And people who flippet out by the 10 euros/day remark: Go read the article again. The remark was in the context of international roaming, which is horrendously expensive in Europe. 10 euros/day for unlimited data roaming might not be too bad compared to the usual rates the carriers charge for this. When you're in your home country, these services can be quite cheap. Generally the prices start from about 10euros/month for 384kb/s unlimited access and go to 20euros/month for 1Mbit/s unlimited or 30euros/month for 2Mbit/s unlimited access. (These prices are from the price lists of major carriers in Finland: http://saunalahti.fi/gsm/mobiililaajakaista.php, http://www.elisa.fi/matkaviestinta/liittymat/hinnasto/, http://www.sonera.fi/Puhelin+ja+liittym%E4/Liikkuva+laajakaista). Somebody commented in this discussion that mobile broadband that covers the whole country for 40$/month will maybe happen in 20 years. Well, it is already reality in Finland.

Coincidentally, in todays edition of Helsingin Sanomat (the largest newspaper in Finland) there was an article about the rising popularity of "mobile broadband" (article in Finnish only): http://www.hs.fi/talous/artikkeli/Langattomalla+laajakaistalla+valtava+kysynt/1135234701006. Although the article talks more about the marketing of the HSDPA modems for laptops, it also mentions that the carriers expect that during this year about 10% of their clients will have subscribed to mobile broadband services. So the shift from Wi-Fi hotspots (that are nearly non-existent in Finland) to mobile broadband accesss is already happening - at least in Finland. I would imagine the situation is nearly identical in other Nordic countries also, and maybe in other countries in Europe.

In Finland Saunalahti has to offer somewhat similar deal with their Wippies project. You cannot get unlimited bandwidth but you get a free ADSL/WLAN box plus a 4GB mailbox. The rules also define you must share your internet connection through the WLAN for the first year. There is also hot spot maps, blogs and other "creative stuff" built around it.

Prices in Finland. I have an unlimited-use 128 kbit/s connection for 10 euro/month. The US prices are due to either a cartel or local monopolies. If the market had working competition, why is the US more expensive than the rest of the world?

'Would you like to see the menu?' he said,

'or would you like meet the Dish of the Day?'

'Huh?' said Ford.

In our work, we investigate whether, and to what extent, the unique physical phenomenon of long lifetime resonant electro-magnetic states can, with long-tailed bona-fide (non-radiative) modes, be used for efficient energy transfer. Intuitively, if both the drain and the source are resonant states of the same frequency with long lifetimes, they should be able to exchange energy very efficiently, while interaction with other environmental off-resonant objects could be negligible. Of course, intricacies of the real world make this simple picture significantly more complex. Nevertheless, via detailed theoretical, and numerical analyses of typical real-world model-situations and realistic material parameters, we establish that such a non-radiative scheme could indeed be practical for middle-range wireless energy transfer (i.e. within a room, or a factory pavilion). Important novel applications are thus enabled.

The author is credible; he has a good track record in non-linear optics.

There's a somewhat nutty exposition of this resonance phenomenon here by a radio ham. There's actually some decent physics in that article, if you ignore the nutty stuff. This phenomenon has been known for decades. There's a way to actively drive an antenna into resonance and increase the amount of power it receives. The problem is that if you have those resonant currents flowing in your antenna, most of the energy gets lost in resistive heating as the currents slosh around in the antenna. This idea might need superconductors to make it work.

This area hasn't been studied much recently because it relates to antenna design for waves much longer than the antenna. All the action is up in the gigahertz range today, where antennas are tiny. Almost nobody's working on better AM broadcast receiver antennas any more. Interestingly, those wierd ferrite-rod antennas that are inside AM broadcast radios use this phenomenon. There's a radio ham in Finland who built an active resonant ferrite rod antenna for 3 to 12MHz AM signals.

Right now, this power transmission scheme is just a theoretical concept. The physicist talking about it hasn't built one. So it's not yet clear if it can be realized. But it's standard EM physics.

how do we avoid getting sued by the RIAA?

1. Disable directory browsing
2. Don't run any P2P supernodes/ultrapeers
3. Don't share more than ~250 music files
4. Filter known MediaSentry/MediaDefender/Macrovision IPs

There are indeed some Matriarchal societies. And they are very different than our normal societies.
And they are present only in small tribal communities, unspoilt by the "Advancement".

http://www.saunalahti.fi/penelope/Feminism/KhasiGa ro.html

I have a treasure: manual of a Wegematic 1000 computer, from beginning of 1960s.

The machine had vacuum tubes. The operating console included an oscilloscope and bit switches for entering instructions. It did have a punched tape reader as well.

My father programmed it for his graduate thesis, although now he is a member of the blinking twelve generation and would not survive with his mac without my IT support. Changing are the fortunes in life.

Link: http://www.tietokonemuseo.saunalahti.fi/eng/wegema tic_eng.htm

- ac

I am shocked by the blatant bias evident in the voyager plaque; Is this what "intelligent life" on planet Earth looks like? Where are the African-American brother, the obviously homosexual, the kid in a wheelchair, the nerk, and the "cheerfully chubby" munching on a burger? Those are "intelligent life" too, you know.

You will find in another child post related to the grandparent where I had attempted to do the same trick with a .pdf. Why didn't OLE merge IE functionality and display the .pdf rather than attempt to search for it?

Usually, it does show acrobat in (i)explorer window (though without toolbar and menu merging)

And not nearly all apps supports it.

If it's anything like the computer museum here in Jyväskylä, Finland, then actually YES there's huge stacks of 486's everywhere... But those aren't the ones presenting any storage problems - it's the huge hard drives and stuff from the 50's and 60's that you can't move around without a forklift. And they really can't be sold away to make money - some of the craziest drooling slashdottir MIGHT have the hots for some slick 70's rackmount computer, but nobody wants a room-sized pile of junk metal that could maybe store maybe a megabyte, and in a data-seeking competition would lose to a VIC-1541, if you could afford the electricity to turn it on.

• Official APEv2 Spec (written by Frank Klemm of MPC fame)
• Tag - sources include APEv2 reader/writer
• Apetag - *nix cmdline. APEv2 tagger
• fb2k SDK - includes reader/writer code (BSD-licensed)

While it was a pretty decent movie, production was shoddy. I thought my eyes were deceiving me when I was watching it and thought for sure I was seeing microphones, turns out I was right:

resident evil goofs

What disappears?

Pretty much everything.

W2k desktop with explorer crashed looks something like this. Taskbar is gone too, not hidden, and sometimes things are missing from systray even after you resurrect explorer.

I have crashed IE on Win 2000 (by opening an HTML file that is embeded in itself) and nothing else disappears.

IE doesn't seem to take the another explorer with it every time, but sometimes it does.

Apparently the 1-euro and 2-euro coins are also like this, but I haven't handled either of them yet.

They are.

Pre-Euro Finnish 10mk coin was like this as well.

Nullsoft Winamp, since 2.9 or so, already comes with an Ogg Vorbis decoder plug-in right next to its MP3 decoder plug-in. Now all we have to do is get the Speex plug-in into wide use so that the audio book people can switch. (Speex is specialized to represent a human voice more concisely than a general audio codec such as Vorbis can.)

Yeah converting Mp3s to Oggs is going to make for some crap quality audio files but you gotta start somewhere.

Degraded, perhaps. Still rather listenable, yes. Option to go back to the original source from CDex, absolutely.

I can use the mouse wheel to change the volume on xmms by catching M4 and M5 buttons (i.e. the scroll wheel events) on the root window, which is very handy for headphones and downloaded MP3s.

This can be done more simply, and in any wm, by using xmms-itouch.

Linux has supported it for as long as i can remember. Try the xmms-itouch plugin for XMMS. Otherwise you can go into xev, press the key, see what keycode registers and use .Xmodmap to map those keys to F13, F14, etc. Then you can tell your window manager to do interesting things with those keys. Personally, I use the "eyeball" key (on my cordless freedom pro) to close windows. Sooooo convienient.

...the Finnish police has had this for ages.

I used to use Winamp for that, but now I use Foobar 2000. While not as polished as Winamp, it's an amazing piece of software.

is that seriously not enough for you? :p it won't however play video..

The obvious choice to promote this standard, bongo boy himself:

Matthew McConaughey!

MP3 this, OGG that, AAC somewhere in the middle... Sorry, I don't use any of the above. I encode all of my music into Musepack. At high bitrates, it's the best lossy audio codec, period. For more information on Musepack, see Case's Musepack Page</a>, or <a href="http://www.hydrogenaudio.org/index.php?act=S T&f=11&t=1927&">List of Recommended Musepack Settings</a>.

Musepack encoders and decoders are available for both Windows and Linux, with Winamp plugins available. The only real downside to Musepack is there is currently no hardware support. But having tried each of the codecs mentioned in this article as well as Musepack at the Quality 8 setting, Musepack is music to my ears each time.

1. Get a clue
2. Maserati

Apparently the current underground favorite audio player for Windows is foobar2000, which was written by a former Nullsoft developer (Peter P. aka zZzZzZz). It supports mp3, ogg, ape, flac, mpc, and relevant to the article has abandoned ID3V2 support in favor of APEV2 tags. (And it's been suggested that the source will be released in the near future.) Supposedly the audiophile geeks at hydrogenaudio.org can hear quality improvements over Winamp, although even the developer suggests that it's probably a placebo effect.

Just don't expect too much; it's a very minimalist GUI (what mean these "skinz" of which you speak?), and doesn't support Win9x/NT4.

There's also a support forum for the player.

a bit more complicated stuff than in the article, antennae's from finland

Who cares because Vorbis 1.0 has gone gold!!! Whoo hoo. Here is a windows binary. Try encoding at the lowest quality value...about 64kbps second and be AMAZED! Otherwise get the source from CVS

here should be the right link for radio shack...

If that fails go to this page, and find the link "screw on type" a little ways down the page. That's the part.

In addition, check these pages for more info:

Bake-off

Howto (be sure to see all the links at the end of that page...)

Waveguide theory HTH, Enjoy!

We got hold of some old cash register machines (IBM). It has DOS installed (used under some AS/400 system), but it wasn't good enough.

We tried Windows 98 and Windows NT, but all we came up with was a crashing machine. After struggeling with the MS-based OSes, we tried Linux. Everything matched together and we got everything to work!

We had some problems with X, but that solved after we added a GeForce2MX graphiccard to the machine, so now you could probably play Quake2 with quite good FPS =) Oh well, the Cyrix 233MHz processor is not that fast.

Next week they will be in production, and the main interface is... ..Mozilla!

Here are some early experiments with the machine (running bitchX).

The basic nature of airsoft is quite similar to that of paintball - one team must, using a gun shooting non-lethal ammunition, either eliminate the opposing team or accomplish a pre-defined objective. The main differences of airsoft are the facts that airsoft guns shoot 6mm plastic BBs that do not leave paint marks and that the guns are extremely accurate replicas of actual firearms. Because the plastic BB is not as volatile as a paintball, airsoft guns are capable of fully-automatic fire - some at a rate of over 1200rd/min! Also, because the plastic BB is relatively light (usually 0.2g) and the muzzle velocity is usually at around 100m/sec (~300fps), they are quite safe to use in close quarters combat - paintballs tend to make very ugly welts when shot from close distance.

From a geek's point of view, the above facts introduce some very interesting elements. The realistic appearance of airsoft guns gives incredible opportunities to simulate situations in computer games and movies! Have you ever wanted to pull two H&K MP5Ks underneath a long black jacket and blast away? Or jumpdodge over a sofa, firing with two Berettas and grinning like a maniac? How about some live-action Rainbow Six? The possibilities are endless!

At least here in Turku, Finland, the local players get together every week to play short games with simple objectives, such as defending a building/hill/other location, planting/defusing a bomb or just plain capture the flag. Every summer there are some bigger games with a more complicated scenario and up to 200 players in some cases. Some games even introduce some light role-playing elements to the game for additional realism and atmosphere.

There is plenty of information about airsoft on the net, but here are a few pointers to get you started;
Ilendil's airsoft page
Arnie's Airsoft
AirsoftZone

You can find other 802.11b antenna experiments in Finland and in Belgium with HomeMade antennas (this is in french, sorry). The 'KoekelBerg2 experiments' show the signal strength for a 3.9 km link with home made helicals and tin cans. We also got -85/-98 dBm with a can on a side and a simple lambda/4 wire on the other (the measure is on this side). We don't know if the apparent better performance of tin cans over helical antennas (which are much more difficult to build) is due to some error in our helical design (based on Jason Hecker's design) or not. I've got some other links here And, just a note about dB's : adding 6 dB allows you to double the distance.

This gives 'penisbird' a completely new meaning! A new Penisbird!

...that I would happen to be surfing the humor sites today and find this picture of a space shuttle!

Guess I'll have to travel many country by myself now. *sigh*

In practice you need a line of sight and radio frequency is used by many other devices. A common joke is to call it instead of a "wireless Network" a "connectionless network". Still those few who have managed to get a subscription seem to be more than happy.

I wholeheartedly agree. And remember, folks: There is no art! Never fall into trap of comdemning what you don't even try to understand. I read the article and thought this idea was interesting...

-W4, a random artist and art lover =)

And like Italy there are almost as many mobile phones as telephone lines.

I assume you mean telephones. Anyhow, we got past that point several months ago. Face it: there are more cell phones than there are regular ones.

There are three GSM operators in here, Sonera (originally Telecom Finland, partially owned by state), Radiolinja (owned partially by local telephone companies) and the Swedish Telia (also partly government-owned). Fourth is coming, Saunalahti will begin it's cell phone service in a month or so. Hope they'll push the already reasonable (albeit still expensive for a student :) prices down a little bit more. Especially WAP connection prices are way too high IMHO.

Actually, BMW in the past hasn't been much of a partner to Microsoft, e.g. their development is done on non-MS machines (I can't remember what, but undoubtedly someone will). A humorous example of their disdain for MS is this picture.