My brother in law helped design it for third world countries with slow dial up, so that they can interact with the web at large, but I found another good niche for it.
For half a year I worked on a luxury yacht, doing mostly blue water sailing to the high latitudes. Currently the only reasonably priced satellite connections are the Inmarsat B Fleet range, with a maximum speed equivalent to Dual ISDN.
Trouble is, that costs about $20 a minute, so instead the crew would be forced to use a packet switching service with a maximum speed of 33.6kbps. Surfing the web at that speed is simply unbearable, but if you put the URL into loband you can actually surf most sites at a comfortable speed.
We used it mostly for navigating the image heavy NOAA and Canadian Ice Service home pages until we found the chart we wanted then copy and pasting the link into wget. That way if the yacht suddenly rolled and the connection was severed it wouldn't have been for nothing.
Once over 80 degrees latitude, Inmarsat B drops below the horizon, and you have to use Iridium for data connections at 9.6kbps! Try surfing the normal web with that.
That's simply not true. DNA and fingerprints are taken on arrest, regardless of whether or not you are charged. There is no system in place to remove this data once it is taken, even if you are found to have been wrongly arrested (I have had first hand experience of this).
How else could there be over 3 million, almost 5% of the population on the database?
As a British citizen I can't decide which scares me more, DNA databasing or CCTV cameras. I can't wait to move to Patagonia.
I tend to agree with you. I don't see any reason to go with an iPod when you could have an SD Card based player with a couple of 32 gb cards. I use the iaudio d2which has similar multimedia features to the touch, albeit with less fancy graphics and animations. There is no need for a music player, all you do is drag folders over onto the device, and its much easier to copy files off onto your friends computers.
The main reason I got it however is because it supports FLAC and OGG Vorbis files, one of the few players that does. Plus it has digital radio which is quite heavily used here in the UK.
If that is the kind of thing US anti-trust rulings are interested in, they never would have allowed the merger of Adobe and Macrovision. Of course, that went through without a hitch, I cant see why this wont.
It took him a while firstly because it is a pretty big field and the engineers were convinced it would be in some obscure spot, so they sent him around the periphary. Turns out it was where we had expected, the engineers had just missed it.
Secondly, this guy had a monopoly for probably the entire west country - talk about job security. If you think builders are bad for tea breaks, think what a dowser is like.
When we had our main water line in Herefordshire replaced, Welsh Water had a great deal of trouble finding the original pipe valve in order to shut it off. Our house is an Edwardian Rectory about 500 metres off the road so after consulting the old maps of the area proceeded to dig a series of pits across our front field. This went on for a couple of weeks resulting in a fairly good recreation of a WWI battlefield.
It was pretty odd, we knew where the pipe entered the house and where the junction was to the mains, but the earlier Brits had a special way of routing things. Anyhow, believe it or not Welsh Water employ a dowser who looked like someone from the mesolithic; low and behold he found the pipe after a couple of days.
Pot luck? Maybe. Or perhaps Welsh Water have a strong desire to instill mystical beliefs in their customers. Either way that episode certainly changed my views on it.
As someone on IMDB said: "Space battles set to Bolero, what more could you ask for?"
Anime seems to have a much greater breadth of topics than any other visual medium. The trouble is a great deal is complete crap, so you find yourself spending one half of your time trawling through forums to find recommendations and the other half watching some juvenile rubbish.
Without a doubt however, when you find gems it is completely worth it. The series are often over 20 episodes long so you can totally immerse yourself in the universe. By far my favourite is Legend of Galactic Heroes, if you are into science fiction you should definitely check it out. It is over 100 episodes long, so it is quite a long haul, but the sheer number of deep and varied characters is simply astounding.
But this is one of the most serious anime series I know, most don't live up to the time spent downloading them.
I think amongst the slashdot (and greater IT) crowd the biggest problem with vista is more along the lines that it is damned frustrating to use. We have all pretty much used Windows NT from at least 4.0 through to XP and have got used to the way all the advanced things were done. Sure the advent of the MSC in 2k was quite a big change, but it made everything easier. Now vista has made a serious change in how all the settings are accessed, and it is now much harder and long winded.
Thing is, I shudder when I have to help people fix a vista computer, because I know it will annoy the hell out of me and I presume it is the same with most tech guys. All the idiosyncrasies that we had overcome with NT have all pretty much changed. It reminds me of the first time I used linux after growing up on a Sun system. I could tell that everything was very much geared up for the user, but I still found the changes very frustrating. Take for example the new User directory in Vista, half the files are junctions and Vista doesn't come with any utilities to edit them!
I am sure Mac users found a similar thing going from OS 9 to OS X, but the difference was that OS X had a lot of very compelling reasons to switch. There were just as many backward compatibilty problems that you speak of there as well. The simple truth is that Vista changes a great deal but doesn't offer anything we really need.
I am amazed that you couldn't see what was wrong with that post when you wrote it. 'America does not have the sufficient industrial,' give me a break! The prerequisites of having an empire have *never* been simply military force like the pre-21st century European models. Have you never played Civilisation!
Phoenicia and the Dutch had their trade empires, Teotihuacan of Mexico had an informal empire built around resource control, many of the empires of Mesopotamia held theirs together as much with ideological beliefs as with military force. Sure, it is easier to identify historically the empires which ruled by sending a couple of thousand soldiers to stamp out their beliefs, but if the same can be done without bloodshed, why bother? What an empire really is about is taking power away from the local ethnic population through a central administration, and giving that power to local representitives who are on your side. How often do you see America (and to a lesser extent China and Western European) do this? All the time, just think of the World Bank, NAFTA or WTO.
America has generally awoken to the fact that modern warfare is incredibly ineffective (how Bush failed to realise this I do not know) and where as in the past it was quite easy to set up a formal empire simply by defeating the ruling classes, in todays world of post-nationalism and religous fundamentalism you have to go against entire populations. Informal empires are therefore much much easier and more efficient.
I personally don't think there is anything intrisically wrong with one nation strongly influencing or controlling another so long as there is always the end goal of full suzerinity, but that is usually where empires go wrong and another debate altogether.
Besides, Russia is still very much an empire, the last european one in fact.
Slashdot Mirror
...use http://loband.org/
My brother in law helped design it for third world countries with slow dial up, so that they can interact with the web at large, but I found another good niche for it.
For half a year I worked on a luxury yacht, doing mostly blue water sailing to the high latitudes. Currently the only reasonably priced satellite connections are the Inmarsat B Fleet range, with a maximum speed equivalent to Dual ISDN.
Trouble is, that costs about $20 a minute, so instead the crew would be forced to use a packet switching service with a maximum speed of 33.6kbps. Surfing the web at that speed is simply unbearable, but if you put the URL into loband you can actually surf most sites at a comfortable speed.
We used it mostly for navigating the image heavy NOAA and Canadian Ice Service home pages until we found the chart we wanted then copy and pasting the link into wget. That way if the yacht suddenly rolled and the connection was severed it wouldn't have been for nothing.
Once over 80 degrees latitude, Inmarsat B drops below the horizon, and you have to use Iridium for data connections at 9.6kbps! Try surfing the normal web with that.
loband is an absolute life saver.
That's simply not true. DNA and fingerprints are taken on arrest, regardless of whether or not you are charged. There is no system in place to remove this data once it is taken, even if you are found to have been wrongly arrested (I have had first hand experience of this).
How else could there be over 3 million, almost 5% of the population on the database?
As a British citizen I can't decide which scares me more, DNA databasing or CCTV cameras. I can't wait to move to Patagonia.
I tend to agree with you. I don't see any reason to go with an iPod when you could have an SD Card based player with a couple of 32 gb cards. I use the iaudio d2which has similar multimedia features to the touch, albeit with less fancy graphics and animations. There is no need for a music player, all you do is drag folders over onto the device, and its much easier to copy files off onto your friends computers.
The main reason I got it however is because it supports FLAC and OGG Vorbis files, one of the few players that does. Plus it has digital radio which is quite heavily used here in the UK.
If that is the kind of thing US anti-trust rulings are interested in, they never would have allowed the merger of Adobe and Macrovision. Of course, that went through without a hitch, I cant see why this wont.
You're right, don't often type that phrase.
It took him a while firstly because it is a pretty big field and the engineers were convinced it would be in some obscure spot, so they sent him around the periphary. Turns out it was where we had expected, the engineers had just missed it.
Secondly, this guy had a monopoly for probably the entire west country - talk about job security. If you think builders are bad for tea breaks, think what a dowser is like.
When we had our main water line in Herefordshire replaced, Welsh Water had a great deal of trouble finding the original pipe valve in order to shut it off. Our house is an Edwardian Rectory about 500 metres off the road so after consulting the old maps of the area proceeded to dig a series of pits across our front field. This went on for a couple of weeks resulting in a fairly good recreation of a WWI battlefield.
It was pretty odd, we knew where the pipe entered the house and where the junction was to the mains, but the earlier Brits had a special way of routing things. Anyhow, believe it or not Welsh Water employ a dowser who looked like someone from the mesolithic; low and behold he found the pipe after a couple of days.
Pot luck? Maybe. Or perhaps Welsh Water have a strong desire to instill mystical beliefs in their customers. Either way that episode certainly changed my views on it.
As someone on IMDB said: "Space battles set to Bolero, what more could you ask for?"
Anime seems to have a much greater breadth of topics than any other visual medium. The trouble is a great deal is complete crap, so you find yourself spending one half of your time trawling through forums to find recommendations and the other half watching some juvenile rubbish.
Without a doubt however, when you find gems it is completely worth it. The series are often over 20 episodes long so you can totally immerse yourself in the universe. By far my favourite is Legend of Galactic Heroes, if you are into science fiction you should definitely check it out. It is over 100 episodes long, so it is quite a long haul, but the sheer number of deep and varied characters is simply astounding.
But this is one of the most serious anime series I know, most don't live up to the time spent downloading them.
I think amongst the slashdot (and greater IT) crowd the biggest problem with vista is more along the lines that it is damned frustrating to use. We have all pretty much used Windows NT from at least 4.0 through to XP and have got used to the way all the advanced things were done. Sure the advent of the MSC in 2k was quite a big change, but it made everything easier. Now vista has made a serious change in how all the settings are accessed, and it is now much harder and long winded. Thing is, I shudder when I have to help people fix a vista computer, because I know it will annoy the hell out of me and I presume it is the same with most tech guys. All the idiosyncrasies that we had overcome with NT have all pretty much changed. It reminds me of the first time I used linux after growing up on a Sun system. I could tell that everything was very much geared up for the user, but I still found the changes very frustrating. Take for example the new User directory in Vista, half the files are junctions and Vista doesn't come with any utilities to edit them! I am sure Mac users found a similar thing going from OS 9 to OS X, but the difference was that OS X had a lot of very compelling reasons to switch. There were just as many backward compatibilty problems that you speak of there as well. The simple truth is that Vista changes a great deal but doesn't offer anything we really need.
I am amazed that you couldn't see what was wrong with that post when you wrote it. 'America does not have the sufficient industrial,' give me a break! The prerequisites of having an empire have *never* been simply military force like the pre-21st century European models. Have you never played Civilisation!
Phoenicia and the Dutch had their trade empires, Teotihuacan of Mexico had an informal empire built around resource control, many of the empires of Mesopotamia held theirs together as much with ideological beliefs as with military force. Sure, it is easier to identify historically the empires which ruled by sending a couple of thousand soldiers to stamp out their beliefs, but if the same can be done without bloodshed, why bother? What an empire really is about is taking power away from the local ethnic population through a central administration, and giving that power to local representitives who are on your side. How often do you see America (and to a lesser extent China and Western European) do this? All the time, just think of the World Bank, NAFTA or WTO.
America has generally awoken to the fact that modern warfare is incredibly ineffective (how Bush failed to realise this I do not know) and where as in the past it was quite easy to set up a formal empire simply by defeating the ruling classes, in todays world of post-nationalism and religous fundamentalism you have to go against entire populations. Informal empires are therefore much much easier and more efficient.
I personally don't think there is anything intrisically wrong with one nation strongly influencing or controlling another so long as there is always the end goal of full suzerinity, but that is usually where empires go wrong and another debate altogether.
Besides, Russia is still very much an empire, the last european one in fact.