In my situation VOIP isn't even an option with AT&T. Most of the copper in my neighborhood is going on 60 years old. They pulled in fiber for some dslams some of which even support the uverse stuff. Some people are on loops that have a straight shot and some, like me, are on loops that do crazy zig-zags throughout the neighborhood. So quite literally, the guy one street behind be is screaming along with uverse tripple play while my crappy dsl can't hold a decent signal when the wind stirs ( above ground lines ). To add insult to injury the city has two, not one, two utility poles on my property with an easement and AT&T fiber running right there with the loop I'm on terminating there as well. The last tech I talked to even told me the old loop I'm at the very end of was a 96 pair and that with a new dslam installed on the easement it would be trivial to light up all 96 of us on the old, crappy loop. AT&T has repeatedly told me that no further plans are in order for improvements to loops in my neighborhood as they are satisfactory. So then. Does that mean they plan to give me wireless service in lieu of working voip or just blow more smoke up my ass? Some tin cans with string perhaps? For what it's worth, I get far more reliable albeit much slower service from the city provided AT&T wifi service in my neighborhood than I do their shit dsl I pay for. Oh, now I get it, I get to "lease" wifi phones. Cheeky bastards. Also, another dsl node went up about 500 ft from my house but to cover the adjoining neighborhood. *Slaps forehead* I'm hoarse from complaining to them.
So most of the tailgaters I encounter here in California are either impatient asses or what I unaffectionately call celliots. Nothing like driving a Civic down the freeway and having a few tons of a Fraud Excrusion 18 passenger SUV Ultra crawl up your ass at 80+mph because the pilot of said living room on wheels is too busy yapping/texting away. How dare we interrupt their conversations with, you know, driving. I digress.
Anyway, why not take this thing a step further? I say add in some RF spectrum analysis and a retractable cartoon-esque metal hand in the headliner above the driver. Once a proximity alert is detected RF analysis is done to check for local mobile spectrum use. If the signal doesn't fluctuate enough in say 5 seconds to indicate a drop in talking or of the call altogether then the previously mentioned paw O' reckoning drops down, taps the driver on the shoulder and if they continue to ignore it slaps them silly and shakes an accusing finger at them. RF jamming tech could work well too but the FCC will have no part of that and well, its just not as cool as looking in the rearview to see the hand dole out a little justice.
Eon Flux: Dead. Reborn. Dead. Reborn. Dead. Reborn. Dead -- if [ "Eon" = "dead" ]; then rebirth; fi Eon rulez (please excuse 5kr1pt k1dd13 speak) Eon, will you please marry me? Nevemind my current wife - lets move to U**** where it's alright and we can build a super secret superhero fortress/luv-nest in the desert and thwart dickhead badguys together;-) I'm an old married geek. If I comment anymore I'll just shoot myself in the foot again. Ah, what the hell, This *term zombie says "Send more r0x0r Eon - type grrrlz..." Mod me down - I'm going to bed, screw you clowns! Now just where'd I leave my false teeth and ankle wrap? Grumble... complain... ZZzzzzz....
Me too! Well, not quite. In fact they can't at all be called positive phrases and typically I don't give the luser the phrase. They might go off sniveling to somebody who matters as to how I made them say something nasty about themselves pertaining to how it's their 15th password change for that month and how they should be summarily flogged with a bundle of patch cables (cat-o-five tails? My bad...) anytime they intentionally get near anything more complicated than a throw away pocket calculator. Not helpful at all for them but very therapeutic for the ol' sysadmin and that's what truly matters now isn't it?
I'll tell you EXACTLY what would happen. Immediate outlawing of ANYTHING pr0n followed by federally funded programs distributing high end game consoles with anything GTA-like (sans "hot coffee-like mods") they could get their hands on:P
I've got a few things I'd like to bitch about which I like to think are credible. Now mind you, I'm quite the Apple Whore and I HATE Verizon Wireless unto whom I'm tethered but will begrudgingly extol some benefits of.
iPhone is neat but for the TRUE mobile warrior/wackadoo like me it's cute and flashy but fairly useless. I've clocked far too many hours on trains, buses and other inconvenient places for connectivity tethered to some form of cellular data. Tmobile, VZW, Cingular-ATT-HUGE-monopilistic-turd. So far, VZW and ATT have the faster and more useable networks, at least here in the Southwestern parts of the US. VZW slightly wins out in price.
VZW does allow me to tether a laptop for my needs, pretty much unfettered. The few crappy smartphones they offer allow me to run mostly whatever apps I want, again, mostly unfettered. Let me qualify "unfettered". As long as I don't get stupid - big bit torrents, constant hosting, lots of streaming - that sort of stuff, they leave me alone. On my handsets I can sync to what I want, ssh into stuff, get any kind of email, many useful things a mobile sysadmin needs. It ain't sexy and is kludgy (and the windoze phones always suck) but it can always be made to work reliably (your fiddling milage may very from handset to handset) without fear of a pushed firmware upgrade creaming my work environment. No one with said needs can honestly claim that sort of thing from the iPhone. Laptop tethering isn't even an option. I'd buy one as-is if it were.
I do like the iPhone (except for that damned virtual KYB) but for my needs, and surprisingly I've found many more like me than I ever expected to, it simply doesn't fit my needs. The constant hackery a la PSP won't cut it when I need to reliably be able to simply shell into the mothership and slap down some alert or what have you. Ssh on a cellphone is both a painful and useful thing and the complete denial of a tether to a more suited computer is just deplorable.
I understand what Apple is trying to sell but man, they needed to release it with the SDK from the get-go and allow for a tethering option, even if it were at $ATT's gawd-awful prices. They should have done 3G too. IMHO, they should have let loose the iPod touch first and then the phone. But whatever, I'm not switching bloodsucking carriers for at least another two years. I got my crackberry 8830 which is an okay replacement for the Palm 700p, the palm that could have been but never was. *Shrugs* Well At least it's not a Windoze phone...
--Only SIX puppies were harmed in this posting. Not SEVEN! SIX PUPPIES! Don't you get it man? Why would anyone want to do SEVEN puppies when they can get it done with SIX?!?
I was really hoping that this was a story about the jamming of cellphones into various orifi of their rude users was on the rise. Oh, wait, that would never happen because the cell carriers have everyone already jam packed full of things in said orifices. That said, it all kind of makes sense now. We pay to be abused by the carriers and in turn passively share that abuse with those around us. Man, why do telco's hate humanity so?
I want to see the RIAA hire some of those Nigerian 419er fiends and start concocting some really wacky, sketchy methodologies for "seeking compensation". Yup, good times!
I think you may have just hit on the very reason why Apple isn't supporting 3rd party apps. I'll bet the deal with AT&T had some sort of language to prevent this very thing since many of the iPhone's coolest features require a lot of data access.
Indeed. Having worked in wireless myself, down in the customer support trenches, I can tell you that most carriers rue the dawn of Treo's and Win smartphones and such. If they could take it all back without blatantly appearing to be the complete and utter bastards what that they are then they certainly would faster than a 10khz tone drops an old fashion amps call.
Enter his Steveness wielding the iPhone. It does a few nifty tricks heretofore unseen from cellphones and oh, look, it's an iPod too. "Smartphone schmartphone" sez AT&T execs, "it's an iPhone and that's different. Make Mr. Jobs tweak the reality distortion field to our liking. He will acquiesce if he wants his precious to ever touch a network like ours, Muwahahaha!" Making a deal with a carrier is akin to making a deal with the dark one himself. I'd not be surprised if the iPhone has shed features along the way, features some of us have been bitching for. I've seen this first hand many times. Think Motorola and Verizon for example. Or Nokia and most any US carrier. And need I remind you how supposedly Jobs had approached VZW first who then sent him packing? It's my observation that most of us will never again see the day of newer "smart" phones getting to market 100% unmolested and in their original state as intended by the manufacturers.
Indeed! Take out the cell radio, leave in the wifi and bluetooth, allow it the ability to pair with a phone as a headset and for dun and either leave the mic in it or do some sort of headphones with a mic and... perfect! Caller ID and media player pausing when a call comes in is a must. Baring that, I can always keep what I have and get one of these. True, no cool browser or the bigger touch screen but the headset/CID/pause thing means the most to me.
Seriously, not to troll, I have not had good experiences with Bluetooth on Palm devices. TFA stated that will be a primary I/O so I really hope they have their shit in one bag now for the bluetooth. I for one use a lot of wireless data and trouble free cellphone tethering is a must and with that said cables are a drag.
I am an hobbiest photographer and I use a dslr for the most part. I am truly amazed at the progress of some camphones and have taken some very interesting shots ( by other peoples standards than just my own opinion ) with some of these. I have no doubt that the technology will continue to amaze but what I don't see in camphones is the artistic versatility a good dslr affords the photographer. And I know cellphones quite well. When, if ever, will we be able to purely and directly play with shutter speed, aperture, focal lengths all of the other things for those of us who are into that type of shooting? I think there's little to no market for it, personally. There may crop up the few novelties which cover some of that but overall this is comparing apples and oranges IMHO. I think more accurately the comparison is to good and versatile point and shoot pocket cameras. And no, I didn't RTFA yet. This rant is merely my slash-jerk reaction to the idea of these sorts of cameras driving the decline of sales of dslrs. One thing is for certain, it's going to be fun to watch whatever pans out;-)
...I'm watching them watch me watch them right now...
Plus the RIAA has their hooks in many different industries now (blank media for one).
Yeah, no shit on that. I seriously am wondering what's next, perhaps some sort of "packet tax" for lack of a better description? It would go something like this. RIAA STOOGE: "So you see, we have no way of really telling who's doing what and it's just killing our business to continue on with all of this traffic sniffing and cajoling of the ISPs, all the various law suits and what-not. Oh and what of all the money we're spending on advertising to get the word out to fellow American consumers that it's wrong to become an independent recording artist, record label and/or broadcaster as well as how wrong it is to buy their products? WRONG I TELL YOU! It is pure and simple black market practice. However I digress. Sirs, we're asking for your help in enacting legislation to put an end to our woes once and for all. We're proposing a global music bandwidth use tax..."
You took the words right from my mouth. The only addition I'd make is make sure it's a GSM or CDMA phone. There's tons of used amps/namps (analog) and tdma phones out there but coverage for those older phones is shrinking and will soon be non-existent. Furthermore, with a GSM phone, make sure you get a quad band for better coverage. With CDMA any dual band digital or tri-band digital+analog phone will do. I bet you could ask around your neighbors, friends, family and/or coworkers and find quite the selection to choose from which they'd most likely give you.
Okay, yes, quicktime too, I forgot about that. But I'm talking about '96/7 or so when I first remember trying NPR streams and as I remember it Real was the only thing out there that could (kinda) stream (sort-of) reliably over the type of connections we had back then on windoze boxes. I was still wandering around in windoze-land back then, just starting to play with Linux and Mac was a far off and pricey dream then to me. I remeber some quicktime streaming but I seem to associate it mostly to postage-stamp video then, at least on the windows side of things. Honestly, I pretty much avoided streaming for the most part then because it was such a pain in the ass at the time. So was audio streaming (similar to what we have now) at the time more prevalent with Quicktime? Like I said, I mostly avoided it then so my perception could be way off. As for Real, I can't stand them. Never did like 'em. I like to think they stunted growth in multimedia content delivery more than help it. They were a pain in the ass then too and still are today.
-C
Call me wrong if I am but it seems to me that most folks who listen to NPR are at least somewhat familiar with what DRM is and all that accompanies it. At least for myself and the other NPR listeners I talk to that's he way it is. Still, good to see the word is getting out beyond just the Internet. Forgive me for stating the obious but what really should be done concerning rights management as far as media is concerned would be campaigns on the order of the bullshit the which the RIAA and MPAA have been spewing, sans the bullshit of course. Perhaps this is a step in that direction. Keep it up NPR.
As for the Real Media encoding from what I remember it was the only useable and widely accepted option around when NPR first started offing audio content online. Still, much better options abound these days. They should at least transition to them over a few weeks or months time if they're woried about pissing off listeners who are unaware and set in their ways.
-C
My experience pretty much mirrors yours. What I've been wondering, and this may be straying a bit off topic so please forgive me, what with caller ID that I pay for, are there any handsets around that I can setup an ACL on? In other words, if the number gets ID'd and it's allowed then the ring can pass through, else, I want it to hang up without so much as a peep. Well, maybe a flashing led and some sort of simple log.
I looked around a bit in Asterisk when I thought for awhile that I'd try getting the whole family onto a private VOIP network and call myself the "Telco Cornholing Free Telephony Company" or some such nonsense. Oh, to the point, yes sorry - I think I saw some sort of access control like what I stated above in the PTSN gateway stuff. Something to think about but really, I'd just like to know of some consumer level product where I could do all of that from the handset. But I digress.
I can't help but wonder if these two clowns are trying to "align themselves" to the "new ways of distributing entertainment media". In other words are they scrounging around for new jobs with dollar signs in their eyes, visions of leading some yet to be formed companies into the brave new world of selling entertainment on the internet? Just a thought...
Avril Lavigne? So we have Canada to blame for this pox. First Celine and now Avril. C'mon Canada, what the hell did we ever do to you? Well, other than that lil' Southpark song thingie... Please, for the love of humanity, take her back and freaking keep her. Perhaps there should be DRM up there. It should keep Avril Lavigne songs from being played anywhere but within the Canadian borders and at the same time prevent any music but hers from playing within the Canadian boarders. That'll teach 'em!
Just yell "SPEAK THE KING'S ENGLISH! Speak the good king's English, I command thee fool!" whilst beating the perpetrator about the head, neck and chest with a rolled up TPS report.
What I mean is all that dark fiber they've been buying up needs to get put to use and soon. They need to turn that stuff up and terminate it however they can, be it wifi, a few select neighborhoods with fiber-to-the-curb experiments, private telco co-ops in rural America, whatever they can deploy. The reason being is so that they can get some sort of fledgling WAN in place before these telco bastards can grease a few more politicians and get it made into law that it's illegal to run any sort of WAN not created and maintained or blessed only by the telco. Call me paranoid but it sure seems we're well on our way there. Motherfucker Bell has an old score to settle with we customers for our insubordination back in the '80's.
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In my situation VOIP isn't even an option with AT&T. Most of the copper in my neighborhood is going on 60 years old. They pulled in fiber for some dslams some of which even support the uverse stuff. Some people are on loops that have a straight shot and some, like me, are on loops that do crazy zig-zags throughout the neighborhood. So quite literally, the guy one street behind be is screaming along with uverse tripple play while my crappy dsl can't hold a decent signal when the wind stirs ( above ground lines ). To add insult to injury the city has two, not one, two utility poles on my property with an easement and AT&T fiber running right there with the loop I'm on terminating there as well. The last tech I talked to even told me the old loop I'm at the very end of was a 96 pair and that with a new dslam installed on the easement it would be trivial to light up all 96 of us on the old, crappy loop. AT&T has repeatedly told me that no further plans are in order for improvements to loops in my neighborhood as they are satisfactory. So then. Does that mean they plan to give me wireless service in lieu of working voip or just blow more smoke up my ass? Some tin cans with string perhaps? For what it's worth, I get far more reliable albeit much slower service from the city provided AT&T wifi service in my neighborhood than I do their shit dsl I pay for. Oh, now I get it, I get to "lease" wifi phones. Cheeky bastards. Also, another dsl node went up about 500 ft from my house but to cover the adjoining neighborhood. *Slaps forehead* I'm hoarse from complaining to them.
Reminds me of a line in a Southpark episode:
"Everybody BACK IN THE PILE!"
So most of the tailgaters I encounter here in California are either impatient asses or what I unaffectionately call celliots. Nothing like driving a Civic down the freeway and having a few tons of a Fraud Excrusion 18 passenger SUV Ultra crawl up your ass at 80+mph because the pilot of said living room on wheels is too busy yapping/texting away. How dare we interrupt their conversations with, you know, driving. I digress. Anyway, why not take this thing a step further? I say add in some RF spectrum analysis and a retractable cartoon-esque metal hand in the headliner above the driver. Once a proximity alert is detected RF analysis is done to check for local mobile spectrum use. If the signal doesn't fluctuate enough in say 5 seconds to indicate a drop in talking or of the call altogether then the previously mentioned paw O' reckoning drops down, taps the driver on the shoulder and if they continue to ignore it slaps them silly and shakes an accusing finger at them. RF jamming tech could work well too but the FCC will have no part of that and well, its just not as cool as looking in the rearview to see the hand dole out a little justice.
Eon Flux: Dead. Reborn. Dead. Reborn. Dead. Reborn. Dead -- if [ "Eon" = "dead" ]; then rebirth; fi Eon rulez (please excuse 5kr1pt k1dd13 speak) Eon, will you please marry me? Nevemind my current wife - lets move to U**** where it's alright and we can build a super secret superhero fortress/luv-nest in the desert and thwart dickhead badguys together ;-) I'm an old married geek. If I comment anymore I'll just shoot myself in the foot again. Ah, what the hell, This *term zombie says "Send more r0x0r Eon - type grrrlz..." Mod me down - I'm going to bed, screw you clowns! Now just where'd I leave my false teeth and ankle wrap? Grumble... complain... ZZzzzzz....
Me too! Well, not quite. In fact they can't at all be called positive phrases and typically I don't give the luser the phrase. They might go off sniveling to somebody who matters as to how I made them say something nasty about themselves pertaining to how it's their 15th password change for that month and how they should be summarily flogged with a bundle of patch cables (cat-o-five tails? My bad...) anytime they intentionally get near anything more complicated than a throw away pocket calculator. Not helpful at all for them but very therapeutic for the ol' sysadmin and that's what truly matters now isn't it?
"Hold onto these wires for me..."
I'll tell you EXACTLY what would happen. Immediate outlawing of ANYTHING pr0n followed by federally funded programs distributing high end game consoles with anything GTA-like (sans "hot coffee-like mods") they could get their hands on :P
Yeah yeah, color me troll...
iPhone is neat but for the TRUE mobile warrior/wackadoo like me it's cute and flashy but fairly useless. I've clocked far too many hours on trains, buses and other inconvenient places for connectivity tethered to some form of cellular data. Tmobile, VZW, Cingular-ATT-HUGE-monopilistic-turd. So far, VZW and ATT have the faster and more useable networks, at least here in the Southwestern parts of the US. VZW slightly wins out in price.
VZW does allow me to tether a laptop for my needs, pretty much unfettered. The few crappy smartphones they offer allow me to run mostly whatever apps I want, again, mostly unfettered. Let me qualify "unfettered". As long as I don't get stupid - big bit torrents, constant hosting, lots of streaming - that sort of stuff, they leave me alone. On my handsets I can sync to what I want, ssh into stuff, get any kind of email, many useful things a mobile sysadmin needs. It ain't sexy and is kludgy (and the windoze phones always suck) but it can always be made to work reliably (your fiddling milage may very from handset to handset) without fear of a pushed firmware upgrade creaming my work environment. No one with said needs can honestly claim that sort of thing from the iPhone. Laptop tethering isn't even an option. I'd buy one as-is if it were.
I do like the iPhone (except for that damned virtual KYB) but for my needs, and surprisingly I've found many more like me than I ever expected to, it simply doesn't fit my needs. The constant hackery a la PSP won't cut it when I need to reliably be able to simply shell into the mothership and slap down some alert or what have you. Ssh on a cellphone is both a painful and useful thing and the complete denial of a tether to a more suited computer is just deplorable.
I understand what Apple is trying to sell but man, they needed to release it with the SDK from the get-go and allow for a tethering option, even if it were at $ATT's gawd-awful prices. They should have done 3G too. IMHO, they should have let loose the iPod touch first and then the phone. But whatever, I'm not switching bloodsucking carriers for at least another two years. I got my crackberry 8830 which is an okay replacement for the Palm 700p, the palm that could have been but never was. *Shrugs* Well At least it's not a Windoze phone...
--Only SIX puppies were harmed in this posting. Not SEVEN! SIX PUPPIES! Don't you get it man? Why would anyone want to do SEVEN puppies when they can get it done with SIX?!?
I was really hoping that this was a story about the jamming of cellphones into various orifi of their rude users was on the rise. Oh, wait, that would never happen because the cell carriers have everyone already jam packed full of things in said orifices. That said, it all kind of makes sense now. We pay to be abused by the carriers and in turn passively share that abuse with those around us. Man, why do telco's hate humanity so?
I want to see the RIAA hire some of those Nigerian 419er fiends and start concocting some really wacky, sketchy methodologies for "seeking compensation". Yup, good times!
I think you may have just hit on the very reason why Apple isn't supporting 3rd party apps. I'll bet the deal with AT&T had some sort of language to prevent this very thing since many of the iPhone's coolest features require a lot of data access.
Indeed. Having worked in wireless myself, down in the customer support trenches, I can tell you that most carriers rue the dawn of Treo's and Win smartphones and such. If they could take it all back without blatantly appearing to be the complete and utter bastards what that they are then they certainly would faster than a 10khz tone drops an old fashion amps call.
Enter his Steveness wielding the iPhone. It does a few nifty tricks heretofore unseen from cellphones and oh, look, it's an iPod too. "Smartphone schmartphone" sez AT&T execs, "it's an iPhone and that's different. Make Mr. Jobs tweak the reality distortion field to our liking. He will acquiesce if he wants his precious to ever touch a network like ours, Muwahahaha!" Making a deal with a carrier is akin to making a deal with the dark one himself. I'd not be surprised if the iPhone has shed features along the way, features some of us have been bitching for. I've seen this first hand many times. Think Motorola and Verizon for example. Or Nokia and most any US carrier. And need I remind you how supposedly Jobs had approached VZW first who then sent him packing? It's my observation that most of us will never again see the day of newer "smart" phones getting to market 100% unmolested and in their original state as intended by the manufacturers.
-Charles
Seriously, not to troll, I have not had good experiences with Bluetooth on Palm devices. TFA stated that will be a primary I/O so I really hope they have their shit in one bag now for the bluetooth. I for one use a lot of wireless data and trouble free cellphone tethering is a must and with that said cables are a drag.
I am an hobbiest photographer and I use a dslr for the most part. I am truly amazed at the progress of some camphones and have taken some very interesting shots ( by other peoples standards than just my own opinion ) with some of these. I have no doubt that the technology will continue to amaze but what I don't see in camphones is the artistic versatility a good dslr affords the photographer. And I know cellphones quite well. When, if ever, will we be able to purely and directly play with shutter speed, aperture, focal lengths all of the other things for those of us who are into that type of shooting? I think there's little to no market for it, personally. There may crop up the few novelties which cover some of that but overall this is comparing apples and oranges IMHO. I think more accurately the comparison is to good and versatile point and shoot pocket cameras. And no, I didn't RTFA yet. This rant is merely my slash-jerk reaction to the idea of these sorts of cameras driving the decline of sales of dslrs. One thing is for certain, it's going to be fun to watch whatever pans out ;-)
...I'm watching them watch me watch them right now...
Plus the RIAA has their hooks in many different industries now (blank media for one).
Yeah, no shit on that. I seriously am wondering what's next, perhaps some sort of "packet tax" for lack of a better description? It would go something like this. RIAA STOOGE: "So you see, we have no way of really telling who's doing what and it's just killing our business to continue on with all of this traffic sniffing and cajoling of the ISPs, all the various law suits and what-not. Oh and what of all the money we're spending on advertising to get the word out to fellow American consumers that it's wrong to become an independent recording artist, record label and/or broadcaster as well as how wrong it is to buy their products? WRONG I TELL YOU! It is pure and simple black market practice. However I digress. Sirs, we're asking for your help in enacting legislation to put an end to our woes once and for all. We're proposing a global music bandwidth use tax..."
You took the words right from my mouth. The only addition I'd make is make sure it's a GSM or CDMA phone. There's tons of used amps/namps (analog) and tdma phones out there but coverage for those older phones is shrinking and will soon be non-existent. Furthermore, with a GSM phone, make sure you get a quad band for better coverage. With CDMA any dual band digital or tri-band digital+analog phone will do. I bet you could ask around your neighbors, friends, family and/or coworkers and find quite the selection to choose from which they'd most likely give you.
Curses! You stole my opportunity to publicly state my daily, obligatory midget-tossing remark! "...can't sleep... midgets will eat me..."
Okay, yes, quicktime too, I forgot about that. But I'm talking about '96/7 or so when I first remember trying NPR streams and as I remember it Real was the only thing out there that could (kinda) stream (sort-of) reliably over the type of connections we had back then on windoze boxes. I was still wandering around in windoze-land back then, just starting to play with Linux and Mac was a far off and pricey dream then to me. I remeber some quicktime streaming but I seem to associate it mostly to postage-stamp video then, at least on the windows side of things. Honestly, I pretty much avoided streaming for the most part then because it was such a pain in the ass at the time. So was audio streaming (similar to what we have now) at the time more prevalent with Quicktime? Like I said, I mostly avoided it then so my perception could be way off. As for Real, I can't stand them. Never did like 'em. I like to think they stunted growth in multimedia content delivery more than help it. They were a pain in the ass then too and still are today. -C
As for the Real Media encoding from what I remember it was the only useable and widely accepted option around when NPR first started offing audio content online. Still, much better options abound these days. They should at least transition to them over a few weeks or months time if they're woried about pissing off listeners who are unaware and set in their ways. -C
Thanks Samsung
-C
Sorry, my bad, couldn't resist. Mod me to hell if you please :-D
My experience pretty much mirrors yours. What I've been wondering, and this may be straying a bit off topic so please forgive me, what with caller ID that I pay for, are there any handsets around that I can setup an ACL on? In other words, if the number gets ID'd and it's allowed then the ring can pass through, else, I want it to hang up without so much as a peep. Well, maybe a flashing led and some sort of simple log.
I looked around a bit in Asterisk when I thought for awhile that I'd try getting the whole family onto a private VOIP network and call myself the "Telco Cornholing Free Telephony Company" or some such nonsense. Oh, to the point, yes sorry - I think I saw some sort of access control like what I stated above in the PTSN gateway stuff. Something to think about but really, I'd just like to know of some consumer level product where I could do all of that from the handset. But I digress.
Ha! Every time you tinker with your gadget God kills a kitten! -C
I can't help but wonder if these two clowns are trying to "align themselves" to the "new ways of distributing entertainment media". In other words are they scrounging around for new jobs with dollar signs in their eyes, visions of leading some yet to be formed companies into the brave new world of selling entertainment on the internet? Just a thought...
Avril Lavigne? So we have Canada to blame for this pox. First Celine and now Avril. C'mon Canada, what the hell did we ever do to you? Well, other than that lil' Southpark song thingie... Please, for the love of humanity, take her back and freaking keep her. Perhaps there should be DRM up there. It should keep Avril Lavigne songs from being played anywhere but within the Canadian borders and at the same time prevent any music but hers from playing within the Canadian boarders. That'll teach 'em!
Just yell "SPEAK THE KING'S ENGLISH! Speak the good king's English, I command thee fool!" whilst beating the perpetrator about the head, neck and chest with a rolled up TPS report.
What I mean is all that dark fiber they've been buying up needs to get put to use and soon. They need to turn that stuff up and terminate it however they can, be it wifi, a few select neighborhoods with fiber-to-the-curb experiments, private telco co-ops in rural America, whatever they can deploy. The reason being is so that they can get some sort of fledgling WAN in place before these telco bastards can grease a few more politicians and get it made into law that it's illegal to run any sort of WAN not created and maintained or blessed only by the telco. Call me paranoid but it sure seems we're well on our way there. Motherfucker Bell has an old score to settle with we customers for our insubordination back in the '80's.