A good friend of mine works for Continental Promotions Group, Inc, a Scottsdale, AZ company that processes rebates for Costco, Dell, and several other large corporations.
Most of the stories I've heard are largely due to the incompetence of the home workers (many of whom do not speak english as a first language) that basically open the envelopes and enter all the relevant data. Their pay? US$0.08 an entry. Not the highest pay around--working dilligently and competently this comes out to about $10/hour.
The reason it takes 10 - 12 weeks is that CPG will usually invoice the company they're contracted with at the end of the month and there's considerable turnaround time. Costco, on the other hand, directly wires the rebate money to CPG--I got my $2 Dove soap rebate a couple of weeks after I mailed it in. Another reason to shop at Costco.:)
My friend works the phones at CPG and basically the problems that he handles with regards to Dell are data entry errors. From this I derive that it's best to type your application... go into some office machine store and just feed the rebate form into a typewriter or whatever. At least make damn sure that the claim is clearly written... if you're a's look like o's you're bound for trouble. Assume that the person who will be processing your rebate is completely incompetent and natively reads Sanskrit.
Also, he sees a lot of situations in which the rebate didn't apply to the customer for whatever reason because a pushy uninformed Dell phonemonkey just wanted to get off the line and close the sale. Make sure that the product you're getting actually has an applicable rebate. Just another reason to not listen to salespeople and by your stuff online.
I didn't tell you this, but most rebates can be reissued for $20 and under cashed or not because it's too much trouble for CPG and their clients to work the specifics out of actually sending out a STOP payment. Get double the rebate simply by calling them and inventing some story.
The average rebate takes ten or so weeks to process, so mark that window on your calendar and a halfway point to remind yourself in a month to call up and check on the status of the rebate by calling up the 800 number.
Most of what the article bitches about is largely just symptomatic of lazy people forgetting receipts and the rebate itself. If the money is important to you, don't forget stuff. Don't throw anything away until you have confirmation that the rebate is on its way or you actually have the check in hand. It's not that difficult to stow a box in the garage.
Keep on top of things and you should have no problem... I got dicked by Ericsson for a hundred bucks because of some missing paper and by the time I called the window expired--this is what you get when you expect the rebate to come without problems! They of course said they sent a letter in response, I never got it. Buyer beware.
Most countries have a publicly funded television network that allows a voice of opinion to be broadcasted that isn't always "politically acceptable".
I've seen some pretty rambunctious stuff on PBS and NPR in my day... that pesky one- or two-digit channel number makes PBS easier to miss all the time!
Nugget's Law: 95% of the time when a Linux user says "Linux" they really mean "Unix".
The other 5% of the time they're referring to an aspect that only applies to their particular distribution
If I'm browsing through a set of pages, and I go back three pages then click on another link, those three pages disappear. The problem is slightly alleviated with browser tabs, but those tend to clutter up my screen during serious surfing time.
Just because it isn't broke doesn't mean it can't be fixed. Windows is universally understood but that doesn't mean a more powerful solution can be found/hould be used/be optional for those who can handle it.
Yes. Leap Wireless, also known as Cricket Communications offers unlimited local calling on their CDMA 2000 1XRTT network (tho almost all phones on said network are CDMA 2G) for US$32.99 a month, taxes and features such as insurance, caller ID, voicemail, and SMS bring my bill to US$52.99 a month, every month--and that's without a contract.
Once you get rid of the expensive fluff known as a Customer Care department that would otherwise take calls from angry customers bitching about being overcharged on their bills and make other cost-cutting measures, the cell phone dollar can be indeed stretched very far.
I would say Ricochet's demise was partially because of the massive up front capital it took to set up the network. They tried to roll it out in my city, but the City Council refused to grant them the ability to place pole top boxes on 7% of all street lamps in the city. More over, Ricochet devices ran in the unlicenesed ISM 900 MHz and 2.4 GHz range, which didn't provide much bandwith, 128 kbps max for $70/month doesn't seem worth it when you can only use it a few places here and there.
ATT et al. have their own towers and will shortly have their own spectrum licenses, enabling far better penetration. ATT also had $13.6 billion in revenue in 2001, dwarving Metricom's and enabling the capital for more advanced, faster wireless data services.
EDGE would actually expand to Enhanced Data for Groupe Spcial Mobile Evolution. Back in 1982, according to this google result, this French term was formed out of a Conference of European Posts and Telecommunications initiatve for pan-European mobile services.
Of course, nobody likes the French and the acronym was ultimately changed to Global System for Mobile [Communication]. And yes, there should be an accent over the e in Groupe but/.'s ampersand character thing is broken.
If I'm ever trapped at the library or foreign language lab here at my local community college and have to accomplish something more productive than studying or listening to the instructor, I always download PuTTY, a free Win32 SSH client.
The good thing about PuTTY is that the downloable.EXE is the entire program. There's no installer and thus the application can be run from even the most locked down of machines with little difficulty.
PuTTY is also super-stable (has never crashed on me, and Notepad can't even say that) and it's GPL'd. Go PuTTY!
This might get modded as a troll or whatever, but I don't care. Moderators, do your worst.
I prefer the capitalist model: That $700 (or whatever) DV cam was designed by a team of engineers, tested by a group of consumers, packaged and sold by JVC, and manufactured using hundreds of components from all over. Each motor, lens, PCB, etc. all has vast amounts of engineering behind it. Then JVC sells this camera to distributors, who truck it to your local Best Buy or whatever electronics shop, where it is put on the shelves and sold at the register.
My point is, that a $700 camera has untold thousands of people getting paid for its development, manufacture, and sale. Many of these people have kids and grandchildren, who will no doubt contribute to the charities you speak. They got paid from the sale of that $700 camera.
Some people tend to forget that money spent in the great engine of capitalism can improve the lives of thousands, where a pittance of direct aid might improve the life of a few if it's not siphoned off by a corrupt government.
Granted, I'm not telling you to stop donating to Your Favorite Charity, but keep in mind there are other ways to help.
Why do you think that 3G is limited to cell phones alone? With an interesting little technology called bluetooth, you can have your 3G cell phone simply used as a data transciever and have a laptop (my old boss's Toshiba's lifebook had built in Bluetooth) or a PDA. My iPaq has a $100 CF/Bluetooth sleeve.
I disagree with the concept of hot-spot wireless...probably because if I wanted the full screen web, I'd browse that on my cable connection at home. I don't want to lug a laptop to some coffee shop and pay US$0.10/minute for the same thing. What I do want is if I'm stuck in line, in class, or away from my office and I have to check something, or I get bored, I want that data available to me easily and quickly without the complexity of a laptop.
Moreover, people in Japan use their tiny-screened cell phones for data more than they do their computers.
Where 3G is failing is not that nobody wants to use it, the data cost is prohibitively expensive. Sprint PCS Vision runs $20/MB. Granted, Sprint is the first on the market with a functioning nationwide 3G system, and once Verizon, et. al. catch up, I believe your perceptions of minidevice web access will change.
nexus:~# ntpdate time.nist.gov
4 Jul 15:17:34 ntpdate[26989]: adjust time server 192.43.244.18 offset 0.000626 sec nexus:~# date Thu Jul 4 15:17:22 MST 2002
It's 3:17 PM right now. So yes, I know what time it is. Debian users can apt-get install ntp or ntpdate... it should be part of the base system in freebsd, and the NTP homepage is http://www.eecis.udel.edu/~ntp/
I wholeheartedly agree that people should be able to run 'low-bandwith' daemons--provided they stay low bandwith. The problem is that 95% of your cable company's customers haven't heard of sshd, 4.9% have, and.1% actually want to run an sshd server. Sorry, you're not in the target market.
Let's explore this further. I should be able to run a low-bandwith web server and serve small personal pages. However, the reality of the other 99% of the customers is this: Code Red/Nimda. Idiots who didn't even know they had a webserver running got wormed and turned a low-bandwith web server into a massive pipeleech that made my Internet connection horrendously slow for about two months and logged tens of thousands of 404's to apache running off my cable. You mention you want to run sendmail. You gonna leave that an open relay? No, I'm sure... but a majority of everybody else who would run an MTA (either accidentally (it came with my WinInternetSharingProgram32 Lite!)) or purposefully isn't smart enough to lock it down, and this further compends the spam problem. Same with people who run NNTP servers and screw up news for everyone else.
Broadband customers as a whole are too irresponsible to run servers and should be prohibited from doing so. That's why this is prohibited in the Accetable Use Policy. It's a bitter reality.
I however, should be free of such restrictions as I'm smarter than most other broadband customers, but until I can prove that to my cable company and/or they see a market in letting intelligent people run servers, I'm... somewhat SOL.
I run sshd, and ftpd for myself. Cox doesn't block it, but they do block SMB (139/tcp), HTTP, and telnet (23/tcp). They have the technical measures to block problematic ports, and I'm quite frankly glad they do that for the nimda reasons discussed above. I run apache off of port 8080 and cox doesn't seem to mind, else they'd send their AUP Gestapo after me
"Cable modems should be priced like burstable T1's used to be. "
Burstable T1's run today in my part of town (Phoenix metro) for a unnegotiatable local loop fee of $400/month, plus data fees of somewhere around $700 - $1200 depending on the provider. I know I'm misconstruing your statement, but as I understand it, Cox.net has an OC-12 coming in to what I assume is the entire Phoenix metro area (3 million people) A pricing structure that would allow for profitability and burstability up to T1 speeds and beyond and the ability to run servers would be only somewhat more cost-effective than an actual dedicated circuit with the added disadvantages of being far less reliable. Cox.net does offer a business rate plan, but it's not nearly as flexible as a T1 feed would be, probably for these reasons. Moreover, people who want to run servers generally can afford colocation (which is far more cost-effective) and/or pay for their own line.
I'm in the same boat as you, I'm a poor geek who likes high bandwith and apache and php and MySQL and all that good stuff, but we're few and far between to even be considered a blip on MassiveCableCo's radar. Maybe, in time...
There's no I-17 "route." The train starts at 19th Avenue and Bethany Home
road, goes South on 19th Avenue to Camelback, east on Camelback to
Central Avenue and goes South on Central Avenue to Washington st (the 0,0
point for maricopa county addressing) east on Washington... it's hazy here
because the alignments aren't in stone because of the ASU tussle,
southeast on McAllister and Eastbound on Apache and into mesa on Main St. I-17 is a mile to the west of where this whole thing starts.
Two lanes of roadway are eaten up for both directions.
"I will also be interested in seeing how many people really use it, and
whether traffic will improve."
I used to take the Red Line which ran every 15 to 30 minutes. The light
rail map basically replaces the Red Line as I see it. The bus was PACKED
every single time I got on it. Moreover, the line runs through the designated Apache
Redevelopment area in Tempe and it is likely that redevelopment will
follow the track.
"Furthermore, it won't help the the many people who now live in Anthem -
you think they will "Park-and-Ride" - ha!"
Anthem isn't that many people... I'd say 6,000 at most. They're a
fringe development at msot. However, given the vast amounts of
development around I-17, they're going to wish they had this as I-17 is
jampacked enough before Anthem came around. That's what light rail is set
out to accomplish--relieving heavy traffic conditions without having to
build additional freeways with the added benefit of acting as a catalyst
for redevelopment in the blighted areas by which it runs.
The project is now entitled Valley Connections and is managed by the Maricopa County Regional Public Transit Authority, also known as Valley Metro. You're mistaken about light rail not fitting without a serious restructuring of the freeway system. In fact, it perfectly augments the highway system in place and what will be built. Light Rail only takes up two lanes of surface street for both directions.
And the reason you haven't heard of it is because you haven't looked. They've finalised the designs of the cars, ordered them from some company, and they've been doing massive planning. Rolling a $10 million/mile transit system isn't easy, nor cheap, but it's ostensibly getting the federal dollars required to aleviate some of that part of the problem. There's also a fuss at ASU about proposed alignments on campus.
This schedule says service should be operating by 2007.
Transmeta, maker of the Crusoe processor for mobile applications (</marketroid>) contracts the actual manufacturing process out to Texas Instruments.
Moreover, they already have a working model using development boards, for from the front page of the link I quote: It is written entirely in VHDL. Originally designed and tested using Altera's APEX20K200E FPGA and Nios development board, the design is now ready for the public.
I'm only going to discuss a few points here, as almost everything here is incredibly well-said.
First off, the reason why I picked 2022 is that you compared looking out the window to today's modern 3D graphics. We're running into hard, physical limits with what we have now, and to get to that true-to-life 3D will require a radical architecture shift (like PlayStation 2's Emotion Engine vs. conventional x86 computing) or maybe those CFNET-manufactured chips, which are 10 years off. Maybe 2022 is a bit late, but I try to be realistic. But I digress.
You made a loose tie-in to bandwith usage: We will need more computing horsepower for graphics and AI and everything else, and we will definitely need more bandwidth than 3 lousy GB per month.
Key word: Will.
Second thing while I have my soapbox: I don't know what the average Joe does, and you're not an average Joe either--you're posting on slashdot. You can throw out statistics that X number of people own a DV camera and Yahoo has Y million users and casual surfing eats 6 - 20 MB/hour and try and correlate them to till the cows come home, but discussing what the average Joe does is wholly academic, and you can't add up anecodtal evidence of a hundred slashdotters to figure Joe out. He's a mythical bastard like that.
I read somewhere that something like 1% of cable internet users eat 90% of the bandwith used, and Optus cable is doing something about it. And this whole slashdot discussion is largely that 1% complaining.
From the article: The [Optus] spokesperson said about 75 per cent of OptusNet Cable users would fall within the 3GB download range, but conceded that some customers would eventually pay more under the new system.
75% is a pretty clear majority, and I think Optus, after much research, has figured out Average Joe.
Lastly, you made one very disagreeable point: These companies want to limit broadcasting, file sharing, etc., as much as they want to limit costs.
Start apache on port 8080 to circumvent your ISP blocking incoming port 80. Serve and broadcast at will. Pay for business class service which raises your upload cap and removes port restrictions. If you have something to say, pay the messenger, just like everybody else.
By the way, @home only blocked incoming port 80 on my segment because of Code Red, et al. Cox.net continues this cap and block as most people are too stupid to run a webserver, and looking at the big picture, I'm actually kind of glad they do this.
I've heard I don't know how many times that "xxxx is enough for the average user" in computer-speak, and every time it's short-sighted.
It is short-sighted, but complain when the Next Big Thing actually arrives. We have 2.4 GHz Pentium IV's, and I'm 'chugging' along on my 500 MHz Celeron, and the most processor intensive operation I do (aside from dnetc, but that doesn't count) is run mplayer, which eats 25% CPU. This is why the tech industry's in a slump, we don't have a Big Thing and haven't had a latest Big Thing for a while now.
Look at the latest greatest game, look at how beautiful the 3D is, and then look out your window and realize how truly shitty it looks and you get the idea. We will need more computing horsepower for graphics and AI and everything else, and we will definitely need more bandwidth than 3 lousy GB per month.
And in twenty years when we're at that point, we'll have a far better Internet infrastructure than what we have now. You presume that the 3GB a month limit will still be the same in the year 2022, and it won't. Sorry.
The problem is, the Internet is as much an entertainment medium as anything else, and it's competing with technologies that are not pay-as-you-go, like television and so forth.
While the Internet is an entertainment medium, it differs from traditional devices by the method of transport: Waves vs. bytes. You can put a 100,000 watt FM tower and cover millions of people with your radio station. With radio and television, you don't pay for each user like you do with the internet distribution.
Calculate the bandwith costs to cover four million people listening to 128 kbps Internet radio instead. To serve this, you'd have to be thinking 4,000,000 * 16 * 1024 bytes per second. Each OC unit (Optical Carrier, as in OC-3) transmits data at 51.84 Mbps, or 6,794,792 bytes per second. Divide out and you're going to need an OC-9645.
Even if this were a regular day, ie, not four million people listening, and you had a fraction of the total listeners, you'd still have to serve massive bandwith out; the costs of which would be far more than any large-market FM radio station could cover.
I'd rather put up my 100,000 watt FM antenna.
I hate to rain on your parade, but the Internet is not the best method of distribution for, uh, packaged entertainment, like pay per view and radio and television shows. Maybe in 2022 when we have your true-to-life 3D, things will change, but it is unfortunate that in 2002 we have advanced so far but still have a long way ahead of us.
This google result talks about playing DivX's on the Sega Dreamcast, which can probably be had for $50 these days give or take. The Dreamcast's Hitachi SH4/200 isn't the quickest processor out there, so this guide indicates to use small resolution divx's, 320x240 or 496x496 and suggests mono MP3's. For a poorman's solution, and seeing as how most television shows taped are 320x(240|288), this should work well.
One idea is to just make a dedicated box yourself--I'm debating this. Playing DivX's with MPlayer on my Celeron 500 takes about 25% CPU if I use the matrox MGA output plugin. The Voodoo3 output plugin is also supported. The Voodoo3's S-video out can be activated with lm-sensors, a linux i2c tool. (or so I'm told) Cobble something together and you could have a nice QAD solution.
I find it despicable that ICANN, an organisation that is supposed to act within the best interests of the Internet as a whole, has bowed to special interests in ways unseen outside the United States congress.
ICANN is supposed to promote competition but they grant responsibility of entire domains to single organisations, and with that we end up with abuses such as.pro serving three special professions and charging out the eye for it.
Why the hell do we need.pro? What is with these restricted domains? How does a restricted domain benefit me or just about any average everyday Internet user, the people that ICANN is supposed to be representing but are ultimately getting shafted by these inane policies.
Screw ICANN. Until today, I did not fully realise the scope of their abuses, but now I will work to dismantle it and someday, God willing, return the Internet to the people. Viva la revoluccion! Viva! (sorry, Cinco de Mayo has inspired me.;)
The sentence is poorly written nonetheless, and it confused at least the person to whom I was replying.
The general notion here is that LSU all of a sudden dropped this lawsuit on Mr. Dorhauer all of a sudden, without warning, during his last week of finals. While I think the timing of that was bad, usually the court date won't be less than a few months from the filing date. Justice may not be blind anymore, but it's definetely very slow.
I'm not defending LSU here, they're convinced they're in the right, which if you look at the trademark law that Dorhauer quotes in his response , whereas their accusations are totally offbased. I do think, tho, that there request he makes a more prominent disclaimer is within reason, but Mr. Dorhauer seems a bit arrogant. According to the advocate article: "'I own the name,' Dorhauer said. 'I can say what I want there.'"
While I did say he's had six months to work this out, that doesn't mean I said he was going to succeed in arbitrating the situation and preventing the lawsuit. LSU needs to use their own law school if they think they're going to win.
Slashdot Mirror
A good friend of mine works for Continental Promotions Group, Inc, a Scottsdale, AZ company that processes rebates for Costco, Dell, and several other large corporations.
:)
... go into some office machine store and just feed the rebate form into a typewriter or whatever. At least make damn sure that the claim is clearly written... if you're a's look like o's you're bound for trouble. Assume that the person who will be processing your rebate is completely incompetent and natively reads Sanskrit.
Most of the stories I've heard are largely due to the incompetence of the home workers (many of whom do not speak english as a first language) that basically open the envelopes and enter all the relevant data. Their pay? US$0.08 an entry. Not the highest pay around--working dilligently and competently this comes out to about $10/hour.
The reason it takes 10 - 12 weeks is that CPG will usually invoice the company they're contracted with at the end of the month and there's considerable turnaround time. Costco, on the other hand, directly wires the rebate money to CPG--I got my $2 Dove soap rebate a couple of weeks after I mailed it in. Another reason to shop at Costco.
My friend works the phones at CPG and basically the problems that he handles with regards to Dell are data entry errors. From this I derive that it's best to type your application
Also, he sees a lot of situations in which the rebate didn't apply to the customer for whatever reason because a pushy uninformed Dell phonemonkey just wanted to get off the line and close the sale. Make sure that the product you're getting actually has an applicable rebate. Just another reason to not listen to salespeople and by your stuff online.
I didn't tell you this, but most rebates can be reissued for $20 and under cashed or not because it's too much trouble for CPG and their clients to work the specifics out of actually sending out a STOP payment. Get double the rebate simply by calling them and inventing some story.
The average rebate takes ten or so weeks to process, so mark that window on your calendar and a halfway point to remind yourself in a month to call up and check on the status of the rebate by calling up the 800 number.
Most of what the article bitches about is largely just symptomatic of lazy people forgetting receipts and the rebate itself. If the money is important to you, don't forget stuff. Don't throw anything away until you have confirmation that the rebate is on its way or you actually have the check in hand. It's not that difficult to stow a box in the garage.
Keep on top of things and you should have no problem... I got dicked by Ericsson for a hundred bucks because of some missing paper and by the time I called the window expired--this is what you get when you expect the rebate to come without problems! They of course said they sent a letter in response, I never got it. Buyer beware.
I think before CITRI plants their flag in Baghdad, they might want to consider the fact that somebody already owns the .iq root server.
From linked page:
Sponsoring Organization:
Alani Corp.
c/o InfoCom
630 International Parkway
Richardson, Texas 75081
United States
I'll pass up expected comment about Texans owning a chunk of Iraq... </troll>
Most countries have a publicly funded television network that allows a voice of opinion to be broadcasted that isn't always "politically acceptable".
... that pesky one- or two-digit channel number makes PBS easier to miss all the time!
I've seen some pretty rambunctious stuff on PBS and NPR in my day
You sound scared shitless at the possibility of that to which you reply.
Perhaps you should've thought about that before you got into the inherently shaky IT industry.
</troll>
If I'm browsing through a set of pages, and I go back three pages then click on another link, those three pages disappear. The problem is slightly alleviated with browser tabs, but those tend to clutter up my screen during serious surfing time.
Just because it isn't broke doesn't mean it can't be fixed. Windows is universally understood but that doesn't mean a more powerful solution can be found/hould be used/be optional for those who can handle it.
Yes. Leap Wireless, also known as Cricket Communications offers unlimited local calling on their CDMA 2000 1XRTT network (tho almost all phones on said network are CDMA 2G) for US$32.99 a month, taxes and features such as insurance, caller ID, voicemail, and SMS bring my bill to US$52.99 a month, every month--and that's without a contract.
Once you get rid of the expensive fluff known as a Customer Care department that would otherwise take calls from angry customers bitching about being overcharged on their bills and make other cost-cutting measures, the cell phone dollar can be indeed stretched very far.
ATT et al. have their own towers and will shortly have their own spectrum licenses, enabling far better penetration. ATT also had $13.6 billion in revenue in 2001, dwarving Metricom's and enabling the capital for more advanced, faster wireless data services.
my US$0.02
EDGE would actually expand to Enhanced Data for Groupe Spcial Mobile Evolution. Back in 1982, according to this google result, this French term was formed out of a Conference of European Posts and Telecommunications initiatve for pan-European mobile services.
Of course, nobody likes the French and the acronym was ultimately changed to Global System for Mobile [Communication]. And yes, there should be an accent over the e in Groupe but /.'s ampersand character thing is broken.
a bit of history behind that.
</pedantic>
If I'm ever trapped at the library or foreign language lab here at my local community college and have to accomplish something more productive than studying or listening to the instructor, I always download PuTTY, a free Win32 SSH client.
.EXE is the entire program. There's no installer and thus the application can be run from even the most locked down of machines with little difficulty.
The good thing about PuTTY is that the downloable
PuTTY is also super-stable (has never crashed on me, and Notepad can't even say that) and it's GPL'd. Go PuTTY!
This might get modded as a troll or whatever, but I don't care. Moderators, do your worst.
I prefer the capitalist model: That $700 (or whatever) DV cam was designed by a team of engineers, tested by a group of consumers, packaged and sold by JVC, and manufactured using hundreds of components from all over. Each motor, lens, PCB, etc. all has vast amounts of engineering behind it. Then JVC sells this camera to distributors, who truck it to your local Best Buy or whatever electronics shop, where it is put on the shelves and sold at the register.
My point is, that a $700 camera has untold thousands of people getting paid for its development, manufacture, and sale. Many of these people have kids and grandchildren, who will no doubt contribute to the charities you speak. They got paid from the sale of that $700 camera.
Some people tend to forget that money spent in the great engine of capitalism can improve the lives of thousands, where a pittance of direct aid might improve the life of a few if it's not siphoned off by a corrupt government.
Granted, I'm not telling you to stop donating to Your Favorite Charity, but keep in mind there are other ways to help.
my US$0.02
Why do you think that 3G is limited to cell phones alone? With an interesting little technology called bluetooth, you can have your 3G cell phone simply used as a data transciever and have a laptop (my old boss's Toshiba's lifebook had built in Bluetooth) or a PDA. My iPaq has a $100 CF/Bluetooth sleeve.
I disagree with the concept of hot-spot wireless...probably because if I wanted the full screen web, I'd browse that on my cable connection at home. I don't want to lug a laptop to some coffee shop and pay US$0.10/minute for the same thing. What I do want is if I'm stuck in line, in class, or away from my office and I have to check something, or I get bored, I want that data available to me easily and quickly without the complexity of a laptop.
Moreover, people in Japan use their tiny-screened cell phones for data more than they do their computers.
Where 3G is failing is not that nobody wants to use it, the data cost is prohibitively expensive. Sprint PCS Vision runs $20/MB. Granted, Sprint is the first on the market with a functioning nationwide 3G system, and once Verizon, et. al. catch up, I believe your perceptions of minidevice web access will change.
nexus:~# ntpdate time.nist.gov
4 Jul 15:17:34 ntpdate[26989]: adjust time server 192.43.244.18 offset 0.000626 sec
nexus:~# date
Thu Jul 4 15:17:22 MST 2002
It's 3:17 PM right now. So yes, I know what time it is. Debian users can apt-get install ntp or ntpdate... it should be part of the base system in freebsd, and the NTP homepage is http://www.eecis.udel.edu/~ntp/
Sh
I wholeheartedly agree that people should be able to run 'low-bandwith' daemons--provided they stay low bandwith. The problem is that 95% of your cable company's customers haven't heard of sshd, 4.9% have, and .1% actually want to run an sshd server. Sorry, you're not in the target market.
... somewhat SOL.
Let's explore this further. I should be able to run a low-bandwith web server and serve small personal pages. However, the reality of the other 99% of the customers is this: Code Red/Nimda. Idiots who didn't even know they had a webserver running got wormed and turned a low-bandwith web server into a massive pipeleech that made my Internet connection horrendously slow for about two months and logged tens of thousands of 404's to apache running off my cable. You mention you want to run sendmail. You gonna leave that an open relay? No, I'm sure... but a majority of everybody else who would run an MTA (either accidentally (it came with my WinInternetSharingProgram32 Lite!)) or purposefully isn't smart enough to lock it down, and this further compends the spam problem. Same with people who run NNTP servers and screw up news for everyone else.
Broadband customers as a whole are too irresponsible to run servers and should be prohibited from doing so. That's why this is prohibited in the Accetable Use Policy. It's a bitter reality.
I however, should be free of such restrictions as I'm smarter than most other broadband customers, but until I can prove that to my cable company and/or they see a market in letting intelligent people run servers, I'm
I run sshd, and ftpd for myself. Cox doesn't block it, but they do block SMB (139/tcp), HTTP, and telnet (23/tcp). They have the technical measures to block problematic ports, and I'm quite frankly glad they do that for the nimda reasons discussed above. I run apache off of port 8080 and cox doesn't seem to mind, else they'd send their AUP Gestapo after me
"Cable modems should be priced like burstable T1's used to be. "
Burstable T1's run today in my part of town (Phoenix metro) for a unnegotiatable local loop fee of $400/month, plus data fees of somewhere around $700 - $1200 depending on the provider. I know I'm misconstruing your statement, but as I understand it, Cox.net has an OC-12 coming in to what I assume is the entire Phoenix metro area (3 million people) A pricing structure that would allow for profitability and burstability up to T1 speeds and beyond and the ability to run servers would be only somewhat more cost-effective than an actual dedicated circuit with the added disadvantages of being far less reliable. Cox.net does offer a business rate plan, but it's not nearly as flexible as a T1 feed would be, probably for these reasons.
Moreover, people who want to run servers generally can afford colocation (which is far more cost-effective) and/or pay for their own line.
I'm in the same boat as you, I'm a poor geek who likes high bandwith and apache and php and MySQL and all that good stuff, but we're few and far between to even be considered a blip on MassiveCableCo's radar. Maybe, in time...
My $0.02
http://www.valleyconnections.com/content_13/index. cfm
There's no I-17 "route." The train starts at 19th Avenue and Bethany Home road, goes South on 19th Avenue to Camelback, east on Camelback to Central Avenue and goes South on Central Avenue to Washington st (the 0,0 point for maricopa county addressing) east on Washington... it's hazy here because the alignments aren't in stone because of the ASU tussle, southeast on McAllister and Eastbound on Apache and into mesa on Main St. I-17 is a mile to the west of where this whole thing starts.
Two lanes of roadway are eaten up for both directions.
"I will also be interested in seeing how many people really use it, and whether traffic will improve."
I used to take the Red Line which ran every 15 to 30 minutes. The light rail map basically replaces the Red Line as I see it. The bus was PACKED every single time I got on it. Moreover, the line runs through the designated Apache Redevelopment area in Tempe and it is likely that redevelopment will follow the track.
"Furthermore, it won't help the the many people who now live in Anthem - you think they will "Park-and-Ride" - ha!"
Anthem isn't that many people... I'd say 6,000 at most. They're a fringe development at msot. However, given the vast amounts of development around I-17, they're going to wish they had this as I-17 is jampacked enough before Anthem came around. That's what light rail is set out to accomplish--relieving heavy traffic conditions without having to build additional freeways with the added benefit of acting as a catalyst for redevelopment in the blighted areas by which it runs.
This is off-topic, but I'm bored.
The project is now entitled Valley Connections and is managed by the Maricopa County Regional Public Transit Authority, also known as Valley Metro. You're mistaken about light rail not fitting without a serious restructuring of the freeway system. In fact, it perfectly augments the highway system in place and what will be built. Light Rail only takes up two lanes of surface street for both directions.
And the reason you haven't heard of it is because you haven't looked. They've finalised the designs of the cars, ordered them from some company, and they've been doing massive planning. Rolling a $10 million/mile transit system isn't easy, nor cheap, but it's ostensibly getting the federal dollars required to aleviate some of that part of the problem. There's also a fuss at ASU about proposed alignments on campus.
This schedule says service should be operating by 2007.
Nope.
Transmeta, maker of the Crusoe processor for mobile applications (</marketroid>) contracts the actual manufacturing process out to Texas Instruments.
Moreover, they already have a working model using development boards, for from the front page of the link I quote:
It is written entirely in VHDL. Originally designed and tested using Altera's APEX20K200E FPGA and Nios development board, the design is now ready for the public.
I'm only going to discuss a few points here, as almost everything here is incredibly well-said.
First off, the reason why I picked 2022 is that you compared looking out the window to today's modern 3D graphics. We're running into hard, physical limits with what we have now, and to get to that true-to-life 3D will require a radical architecture shift (like PlayStation 2's Emotion Engine vs. conventional x86 computing) or maybe those CFNET-manufactured chips, which are 10 years off. Maybe 2022 is a bit late, but I try to be realistic. But I digress.
You made a loose tie-in to bandwith usage: We will need more computing horsepower for graphics and AI and everything else, and we will definitely need more bandwidth than 3 lousy GB per month.
Key word: Will.
Second thing while I have my soapbox:
I don't know what the average Joe does, and you're not an average Joe either--you're posting on slashdot. You can throw out statistics that X number of people own a DV camera and Yahoo has Y million users and casual surfing eats 6 - 20 MB/hour and try and correlate them to till the cows come home, but discussing what the average Joe does is wholly academic, and you can't add up anecodtal evidence of a hundred slashdotters to figure Joe out. He's a mythical bastard like that.
I read somewhere that something like 1% of cable internet users eat 90% of the bandwith used, and Optus cable is doing something about it. And this whole slashdot discussion is largely that 1% complaining.
From the article:
The [Optus] spokesperson said about 75 per cent of OptusNet Cable users would fall within the 3GB download range, but conceded that some customers would eventually pay more under the new system.
75% is a pretty clear majority, and I think Optus, after much research, has figured out Average Joe.
Lastly, you made one very disagreeable point:
These companies want to limit broadcasting, file sharing, etc., as much as they want to limit costs.
Start apache on port 8080 to circumvent your ISP blocking incoming port 80. Serve and broadcast at will. Pay for business class service which raises your upload cap and removes port restrictions. If you have something to say, pay the messenger, just like everybody else.
By the way, @home only blocked incoming port 80 on my segment because of Code Red, et al. Cox.net continues this cap and block as most people are too stupid to run a webserver, and looking at the big picture, I'm actually kind of glad they do this.
If you disagree, reply.
I've heard I don't know how many times that "xxxx is enough for the average user" in computer-speak, and every time it's short-sighted.
It is short-sighted, but complain when the Next Big Thing actually arrives. We have 2.4 GHz Pentium IV's, and I'm 'chugging' along on my 500 MHz Celeron, and the most processor intensive operation I do (aside from dnetc, but that doesn't count) is run mplayer, which eats 25% CPU. This is why the tech industry's in a slump, we don't have a Big Thing and haven't had a latest Big Thing for a while now.
Look at the latest greatest game, look at how beautiful the 3D is, and then look out your window and realize how truly shitty it looks and you get the idea. We will need more computing horsepower for graphics and AI and everything else, and we will definitely need more bandwidth than 3 lousy GB per month.
And in twenty years when we're at that point, we'll have a far better Internet infrastructure than what we have now. You presume that the 3GB a month limit will still be the same in the year 2022, and it won't. Sorry.
The problem is, the Internet is as much an entertainment medium as anything else, and it's competing with technologies that are not pay-as-you-go, like television and so forth.
While the Internet is an entertainment medium, it differs from traditional devices by the method of transport: Waves vs. bytes. You can put a 100,000 watt FM tower and cover millions of people with your radio station. With radio and television, you don't pay for each user like you do with the internet distribution.
Calculate the bandwith costs to cover four million people listening to 128 kbps Internet radio instead. To serve this, you'd have to be thinking 4,000,000 * 16 * 1024 bytes per second. Each OC unit (Optical Carrier, as in OC-3) transmits data at 51.84 Mbps, or 6,794,792 bytes per second. Divide out and you're going to need an OC-9645.
Even if this were a regular day, ie, not four million people listening, and you had a fraction of the total listeners, you'd still have to serve massive bandwith out; the costs of which would be far more than any large-market FM radio station could cover.
I'd rather put up my 100,000 watt FM antenna.
I hate to rain on your parade, but the Internet is not the best method of distribution for, uh, packaged entertainment, like pay per view and radio and television shows. Maybe in 2022 when we have your true-to-life 3D, things will change, but it is unfortunate that in 2002 we have advanced so far but still have a long way ahead of us.
If you disagree, reply.
The new disc can store 150 CDs of favorite songs or an equivalent of 20 DVDs, Tsai said.
So I can't use this disc to store vast quantities of Celine Dion music? Excellent!
Any more information on this Favorite Song Determination technology?
Erm, the aforementioned form is broken, says the latest irix version is 5.0 when I have 8 installed.
http://forms.real.com/real/player/unix/unix.html
The link for the real player download for non-Windows systems is quite well hidden on real.com
http://forms.real.com/real/player/blackjack.html
This google result talks about playing DivX's on the Sega Dreamcast, which can probably be had for $50 these days give or take. The Dreamcast's Hitachi SH4/200 isn't the quickest processor out there, so this guide indicates to use small resolution divx's, 320x240 or 496x496 and suggests mono MP3's. For a poorman's solution, and seeing as how most television shows taped are 320x(240|288), this should work well.
One idea is to just make a dedicated box yourself--I'm debating this. Playing DivX's with MPlayer on my Celeron 500 takes about 25% CPU if I use the matrox MGA output plugin. The Voodoo3 output plugin is also supported. The Voodoo3's S-video out can be activated with lm-sensors, a linux i2c tool. (or so I'm told) Cobble something together and you could have a nice QAD solution.
I find it despicable that ICANN, an organisation that is supposed to act within the best interests of the Internet as a whole, has bowed to special interests in ways unseen outside the United States congress.
.pro serving three special professions and charging out the eye for it.
.pro? What is with these restricted domains? How does a restricted domain benefit me or just about any average everyday Internet user, the people that ICANN is supposed to be representing but are ultimately getting shafted by these inane policies.
.aero, .coop, and .museum.
;)
ICANN is supposed to promote competition but they grant responsibility of entire domains to single organisations, and with that we end up with abuses such as
Why the hell do we need
And don't even get me started on
Screw ICANN. Until today, I did not fully realise the scope of their abuses, but now I will work to dismantle it and someday, God willing, return the Internet to the people. Viva la revoluccion! Viva! (sorry, Cinco de Mayo has inspired me.
The sentence is poorly written nonetheless, and it confused at least the person to whom I was replying.
The general notion here is that LSU all of a sudden dropped this lawsuit on Mr. Dorhauer all of a sudden, without warning, during his last week of finals. While I think the timing of that was bad, usually the court date won't be less than a few months from the filing date. Justice may not be blind anymore, but it's definetely very slow.
I'm not defending LSU here, they're convinced they're in the right, which if you look at the trademark law that Dorhauer quotes in his response , whereas their accusations are totally offbased. I do think, tho, that there request he makes a more prominent disclaimer is within reason, but Mr. Dorhauer seems a bit arrogant. According to the advocate article: "'I own the name,' Dorhauer said. 'I can say what I want there.'"
While I did say he's had six months to work this out, that doesn't mean I said he was going to succeed in arbitrating the situation and preventing the lawsuit. LSU needs to use their own law school if they think they're going to win.
--sean