There's one more consideration I'd throw into the mix: What other wireless devices might you have (or one day have) in the house that might make use of a DSL+WiFi setup?
I have a similar situation -- I travel a lot, and my company's draconian networking policy gave me an incentive to grab a mobile broadband card of my own from Sprint.
Performance is fine for most of my regular day-to-day needs (surfing, mail, and ssh). Performance is marginal for gaming, and I wouldn't want to do big downloads via EVDO...but all-in-all, I could live with it as my sole net connection. Gamers and folks who want thick, super-responsive pipes would hate EVDO, but it's adequate for more causual needs
However, I do maintain DSL service at home...albeit the lowest level of DSL. It is nice to have the connection for doing large downloads (think about patch day if you're on XP or Vista....). And, while I could provide connectivity for the TiVo, Wii, and iPod Touch by plugging the EVDO card into an appropriate router, basic DSL in my area is cheap and convenient.
Out of curiosity, did anyone actually take a look at the story?
A couple of the statements quoted in the Slashdot excerpt don't actually appear in the MSNBC article. While the article does point out that the phone is geared towards disadvantaged markets, there is no comment made that it's being kept out of the U.S. to pad the profit margins of American GSM carriers.
Is this Slashdot fearmongering, or was the MSNBC story edited to appease the sensitivities of the corporate master's advertisers?
>>By "innocent bystanders," do you mean people helping to finance an ISP which caters to spammers?
>Or who have no choice with regards to ISPs because there is only one active in their area?
If a person is stuck with a SPEWS-listed ISP as their only realistic option to get connectivity, they do still have the option of setting up mail access elsewhere. For example, I hear that Gmail is the "in" thing these days.
Our beloved CmdrTaco doesn't dispute that Blizzard has the rights to set and enforce naming conventions in its virtual world. I suspect that if his forced name-change had occurred early in his WOW career, we wouldn't be reading this monologue.
It's the forced name-change of an apparently well-established character in the WOW world, without having an effective avenue to appeal to or complain through that is the problem.
What's happened isn't necessarily wrong (in the "against the rules" sense, at least)...it's just very poorly handled.
Sure thats going to make your average coder hate google...
I love the idea that talented people can make more money, especially in areas with ridiculously high costs of living.
However, consider the coder who comes up with an idea for the next killer app. If they can't get startup funding to hire a few extra sets of brains and typing-fingers domestically, what are their options? Seek assimilation by a corporation, or get in touch with the folks in Bangalore, it seems.
If the talent pool is drying up, be it from Google's quest for brainpower or from other reasons, then perhaps it's time to seek the means to increase the pool.
I've been a tablet owner for almost two months. (Acer 303 -- manufacturer has bad rep and it does feel a little cheap, but I liked the price and the ability to have a 2nd battery). I'm not going back to a regular laptop.
Re Linux -- Tablets run linux. The writeable screen is essentially a combined LCD display and a Wacom tablet.
Re Handwriting recognition -- started out much better than I expected, and only improved from there. Expect more problems when working with technical terms or internet addresses, because the on-board dictionary needs to be trained to such terms.
Re Slate vs Convertible and Keyboard Sizes -- Tablets with larger screens can support larger keyboards, of course. I prefer my convertible form factor to a slate because I still do need a keyboard from time to time -- especially for coding and spreadsheets.
Of course, when I'm at my home office, I connect to a port replicator, and end up working in tablet mode...but with external monitor, keyboard, and trackball attached -- best of all worlds for office-type work.
Actually, dead-tree subscribers can get a subscription to the online edition for a significantly reduced rate ($35/yr, IIRC).
True, it would be better if it were free. But at least some of the content on the WSJ online is unique, and generally better-written and more thought out than the regurgitated wire stories you find at most online news sites.
100s of billions of DVDs annually $27.5 billion in sales annually
If we assume that 100s only means 100, then that means that each DVD sold in America sells for an average price of $0.28. Now, I've personally never seen a new DVD sell for anything less than $10 on sale, so this must mean that there are billions and billions of DVDs being sold for $0.01 or LESS in order to bring down the average cost.
Two problems with that analysis:
1. "Pressed" != "sales". I read awhile back that for every CD sold, some surprisingly large multiple of CDs were pressed. I wouldn't be at all surprised if the same holds true for DVDs.
2. The stats quoted are allegedly global, not U.S. domestic. I can't help but wonder how much a DVD costs once you're outside the US, Europe, Japan, and Australia.
Even in spite of that, I agree: something smells inconsistent with those numbers.
That appears to work for keeping bookmarks on multiple copies of Firefox in sync.
However, the functionality that got me to use Bookmark Converter is the ability to keep bookmarks in sync across browsers. I.e., I want my bookarks to be the same regardless of whether I'm using Firefox, Opera, or (*shudder* when I absolutely must use it) MSIE.
I wish it also handled Konqueror, but at least I found a perl script called fav2adr (which converts MSIE Favorites to an Opera adr file). fav2adr can easily be hacked to produce an xbel file for Konqueror.
After all, they have proven skill in maintaining largedatabases, and everyone knows that they're trustworthy when it comes to consumer's privacy, not to mention their being an all-around good corporate citizen.
What you describe sounds like someone doing some filtering upstream of you.
When the ISP that hosts my domain turned on its own SMTP filtering upstream from my procmail/spamassassin setup a few weeks ago, my apparent spam volume dropped by roughly 75%:
From my logs:
14 Jul: 18,742 spams, 75.3 million bytes 15 Jul: 20,007 spams, 69.2 million bytes 16 Jul: 19,107 spams, 63.1 million bytes 17 Jul: (missing) 18 Jul: 19,328 spams, 64.2 million bytes 19 Jul: 11,489 spams, 36.8 million bytes 20 Jul: 5,052 spams, 12.8 million bytes 21 Jul: 5,313 spams, 14.6 million bytes 22 Jul: 5,664 spams, 13.2 million bytes
...and the spam volume seems to have dropped recently....
17 Aug: 1,706 spams, 5.3 million bytes 18 Aug: 2,599 spams, 7.0 million bytes 19 Aug: 2,365 spams, 6.4 million bytes 20 Aug: 2,464 spams, 6.2 million bytes 21+22 Aug: 4,966 spams, 13.3 million bytes 23 Aug: 2,376 spams, 6.5 million bytes
...although I can't tell whether that's upstream filtering at work, or the scum of the earth being hauled off to jail.
In the current US trials, reporting the driving information is voluntary. Of course, if/when more consumers participate, I'd expect base rates to go up as the folks most likely to qualify for discouts increase their participation.
Fortunately (or unfortunately for me, since I develop auto insurance rates at another company) the rating algorithm is patented by one company, so I wouldn't expect to see widespread adoption of this technology in the US anytime soon.
Of course, one way to expand the VIN number set would be to alter the check-digit algorithm to create a second, parallel numbering space.
For example, if model year 2005, use the old algorithm and increment by one position for the new checksum, and recycle the SAE codeset.
Wash, rinse, and repeat to expand VIN space 30-ishfold.
Yes, it'd break systems that have the check-digit algorithm hardcoded, but VIN verification systems have to be updated regularly anyway to deal with new SAE codes, the recycling of the year digit, etc.
Or, we could just have Wal-Mart tell the auto industry to start relying on RFID tags and their numberset to uniquely identify vehicles, and eliminate the problem until we run out of RFID identifiers.:)
Perhaps one of the reasons I have luck with telecommuting is that my PHB also frequently works from home.
The situation is kinda cool, actually. My office is nominally in Boston. I live in Connecticut; my PHB lives in Florida, and my grandbosses live in St. Louis and Sacramento.
I'm in the odd sitution of working in my office (100 miles away from where I live), telecommuting from a sattelite office (15 miles away), or working from my house as my needs permit.
Curiously, I'm most productive at home, then at the sattelite office, and least productive in my actual office. I figure that's because people won't normally bother me while at home, but in my main office I have quite a bit of time eaten up by the pointy-haired bosses.
Considering that all that many of us need to work is 'net and phone, both of which are increasingly wireless, why should we be stuck in our dark little cubes all day?
No. In this naming convention, the verion number is in the form (generation).(birth order).
As in:
"Hello, my name is Jon Cusack 1.0. I'd like to indroduce you to my kids. My eldest son is Jon Cusack 2.0; my younger son is Jon Cusack 2.1; and my baby girl is Jon Cusak 2.2."
Personally, I'm not a fan of this naming convention. The wife and I just plan to name our kids Larry, Darryl, and Darryl.
I can think of a much better way to make an anti-spam statement with a Porsche, rather than AOL's raffle.
What I'd like to see is the sale of tickets to take out their spam-induced frustrations on the car. I'd pay $5 or $10 to beat upon the spammer's ill-gotten gains with a baseball bat, or to help fill the passenger compartment with a certain alleged meat product from a can.
The festivities could culminate with a bang, say like exploding the spamobile in an expression of what most people would love to do to spammers.
Of course, there would still be the question of what to do with the proceeds of such an event. Using the net profit to pay to flood known spammers' snail-mailboxes with AOL CD's, or to hire people to sneak saltpeter (or some other anaphrodesiac) into spammers' food would be poetic justice.
Slashdot Mirror
At $60 a month, you have something to complain about -- it's $50 if you do the leg work for a SERO plan.
EVDO isn't great for some broadband applications (video, gaming, VOIP), but it's a helluva lot better than dialup for routine email and webwork.
There's one more consideration I'd throw into the mix: What other wireless devices might you have (or one day have) in the house that might make use of a DSL+WiFi setup?
I have a similar situation -- I travel a lot, and my company's draconian networking policy gave me an incentive to grab a mobile broadband card of my own from Sprint.
Performance is fine for most of my regular day-to-day needs (surfing, mail, and ssh). Performance is marginal for gaming, and I wouldn't want to do big downloads via EVDO...but all-in-all, I could live with it as my sole net connection. Gamers and folks who want thick, super-responsive pipes would hate EVDO, but it's adequate for more causual needs
However, I do maintain DSL service at home...albeit the lowest level of DSL. It is nice to have the connection for doing large downloads (think about patch day if you're on XP or Vista....). And, while I could provide connectivity for the TiVo, Wii, and iPod Touch by plugging the EVDO card into an appropriate router, basic DSL in my area is cheap and convenient.
Your mileage may vary.
I suppose that it would be completely unhelpful to point out that my Acer tablet doesn't seem to be afflicted.
.ocx file, and the problem registry entries don't exist on my machine.
At least, a search of the hard drive doesn't turn up the offending
And yes, I'm still running the factory-installed Win XP-Tablet, as sacrilegious as it might be for a Slashdot reader to admit it.
(But at least I'm using Firefox, rather than MSIE).
Out of curiosity, did anyone actually take a look at the story?
A couple of the statements quoted in the Slashdot excerpt don't actually appear in the MSNBC article. While the article does point out that the phone is geared towards disadvantaged markets, there is no comment made that it's being kept out of the U.S. to pad the profit margins of American GSM carriers.
Is this Slashdot fearmongering, or was the MSNBC story edited to appease the sensitivities of the corporate master's advertisers?
Of course, this article wouldn't have made Slashdot if access to all political fora, blogs, etc. were blocked for on-duty personnel.
The allegation that only certain sites, all of which seem to lean a certain way politically, are blocked is what raises eyebrows.
>Or who have no choice with regards to ISPs because there is only one active in their area?
If a person is stuck with a SPEWS-listed ISP as their only realistic option to get connectivity, they do still have the option of setting up mail access elsewhere. For example, I hear that Gmail is the "in" thing these days.
I think SilentChris might be missing the point.
Our beloved CmdrTaco doesn't dispute that Blizzard has the rights to set and enforce naming conventions in its virtual world. I suspect that if his forced name-change had occurred early in his WOW career, we wouldn't be reading this monologue.
It's the forced name-change of an apparently well-established character in the WOW world, without having an effective avenue to appeal to or complain through that is the problem.
What's happened isn't necessarily wrong (in the "against the rules" sense, at least)...it's just very poorly handled.
Sure thats going to make your average coder hate google...
I love the idea that talented people can make more money, especially in areas with ridiculously high costs of living.
However, consider the coder who comes up with an idea for the next killer app. If they can't get startup funding to hire a few extra sets of brains and typing-fingers domestically, what are their options? Seek assimilation by a corporation, or get in touch with the folks in Bangalore, it seems.
If the talent pool is drying up, be it from Google's quest for brainpower or from other reasons, then perhaps it's time to seek the means to increase the pool.
(Geeks ordered to reproduce; film at 11!)
Wheee...where do I start?
I've been a tablet owner for almost two months. (Acer 303 -- manufacturer has bad rep and it does feel a little cheap, but I liked the price and the ability to have a 2nd battery). I'm not going back to a regular laptop.
Re Linux -- Tablets run linux. The writeable screen is essentially a combined LCD display and a Wacom tablet.
Re Handwriting recognition -- started out much better than I expected, and only improved from there. Expect more problems when working with technical terms or internet addresses, because the on-board dictionary needs to be trained to such terms.
Re Slate vs Convertible and Keyboard Sizes -- Tablets with larger screens can support larger keyboards, of course. I prefer my convertible form factor to a slate because I still do need a keyboard from time to time -- especially for coding and spreadsheets.
Of course, when I'm at my home office, I connect to a port replicator, and end up working in tablet mode...but with external monitor, keyboard, and trackball attached -- best of all worlds for office-type work.
Actually, dead-tree subscribers can get a subscription to the online edition for a significantly reduced rate ($35/yr, IIRC).
True, it would be better if it were free. But at least some of the content on the WSJ online is unique, and generally better-written and more thought out than the regurgitated wire stories you find at most online news sites.
100s of billions of DVDs annually
$27.5 billion in sales annually
If we assume that 100s only means 100, then that means that each DVD sold in America sells for an average price of $0.28. Now, I've personally never seen a new DVD sell for anything less than $10 on sale, so this must mean that there are billions and billions of DVDs being sold for $0.01 or LESS in order to bring down the average cost.
Two problems with that analysis:
1. "Pressed" != "sales". I read awhile back that for every CD sold, some surprisingly large multiple of CDs were pressed. I wouldn't be at all surprised if the same holds true for DVDs.
2. The stats quoted are allegedly global, not U.S. domestic. I can't help but wonder how much a DVD costs once you're outside the US, Europe, Japan, and Australia.
Even in spite of that, I agree: something smells inconsistent with those numbers.
That appears to work for keeping bookmarks on multiple copies of Firefox in sync.
However, the functionality that got me to use Bookmark Converter is the ability to keep bookmarks in sync across browsers. I.e., I want my bookarks to be the same regardless of whether I'm using Firefox, Opera, or (*shudder* when I absolutely must use it) MSIE.
I wish it also handled Konqueror, but at least I found a perl script called fav2adr (which converts MSIE Favorites to an Opera adr file). fav2adr can easily be hacked to produce an xbel file for Konqueror.
A few of us use utilities to keep our bookmarks in sync across browsers.
Sadly, I haven't run across such a utility that also preserves the extra info stored in the bookmarks file for LiveBookmarks.
Hey, you forgot Wal-Mart!
After all, they have proven skill in maintaining large databases, and everyone knows that they're trustworthy when it comes to consumer's privacy, not to mention their being an all-around good corporate citizen.
*sigh*....hit "submit" instead of "preview".
The hyperlink is actually https://tripsense.progressive.com/, if you don't want to copy/paste the link.
If you actually want to hear about the program from the horse's mouth, the program's website is https://tripsense.progressive.com/.
Poking around the site, it looks like you can get sample driving reports, a listing of the data they capture, and a (simplified) discount calculator.
What you describe sounds like someone doing some filtering upstream of you.
When the ISP that hosts my domain turned on its own SMTP filtering upstream from my procmail/spamassassin setup a few weeks ago, my apparent spam volume dropped by roughly 75%:
From my logs:
14 Jul: 18,742 spams, 75.3 million bytes
15 Jul: 20,007 spams, 69.2 million bytes
16 Jul: 19,107 spams, 63.1 million bytes
17 Jul: (missing)
18 Jul: 19,328 spams, 64.2 million bytes
19 Jul: 11,489 spams, 36.8 million bytes
20 Jul: 5,052 spams, 12.8 million bytes
21 Jul: 5,313 spams, 14.6 million bytes
22 Jul: 5,664 spams, 13.2 million bytes
...and the spam volume seems to have dropped recently....
17 Aug: 1,706 spams, 5.3 million bytes
18 Aug: 2,599 spams, 7.0 million bytes
19 Aug: 2,365 spams, 6.4 million bytes
20 Aug: 2,464 spams, 6.2 million bytes
21+22 Aug: 4,966 spams, 13.3 million bytes
23 Aug: 2,376 spams, 6.5 million bytes
...although I can't tell whether that's upstream filtering at work, or the scum of the earth being hauled off to jail.
Articles on one insurer in the US doing this in the US include:
Insurer Eyes Driving Habits
Insurers offer discounts to customers who allow their driving to be tracked by electronic monitors
Progressive to Use Data-Logging Device To Help Drivers Save Money On Auto Insurance
In the current US trials, reporting the driving information is voluntary. Of course, if/when more consumers participate, I'd expect base rates to go up as the folks most likely to qualify for discouts increase their participation.
Fortunately (or unfortunately for me, since I develop auto insurance rates at another company) the rating algorithm is patented by one company, so I wouldn't expect to see widespread adoption of this technology in the US anytime soon.
The check digit is position nine.
:)
Of course, one way to expand the VIN number set would be to alter the check-digit algorithm to create a second, parallel numbering space.
For example, if model year 2005, use the old algorithm and increment by one position for the new checksum, and recycle the SAE codeset.
Wash, rinse, and repeat to expand VIN space 30-ishfold.
Yes, it'd break systems that have the check-digit algorithm hardcoded, but VIN verification systems have to be updated regularly anyway to deal with new SAE codes, the recycling of the year digit, etc.
Or, we could just have Wal-Mart tell the auto industry to start relying on RFID tags and their numberset to uniquely identify vehicles, and eliminate the problem until we run out of RFID identifiers.
Perhaps one of the reasons I have luck with telecommuting is that my PHB also frequently works from home.
The situation is kinda cool, actually. My office is nominally in Boston. I live in Connecticut; my PHB lives in Florida, and my grandbosses live in St. Louis and Sacramento.
Telecommuting begets telecommuting, perhaps.
I'm in the odd sitution of working in my office (100 miles away from where I live), telecommuting from a sattelite office (15 miles away), or working from my house as my needs permit.
Curiously, I'm most productive at home, then at the sattelite office, and least productive in my actual office. I figure that's because people won't normally bother me while at home, but in my main office I have quite a bit of time eaten up by the pointy-haired bosses.
Considering that all that many of us need to work is 'net and phone, both of which are increasingly wireless, why should we be stuck in our dark little cubes all day?
No. In this naming convention, the verion number is in the form (generation).(birth order).
As in:
"Hello, my name is Jon Cusack 1.0. I'd like to indroduce you to my kids. My eldest son is Jon Cusack 2.0; my younger son is Jon Cusack 2.1; and my baby girl is Jon Cusak 2.2."
Personally, I'm not a fan of this naming convention. The wife and I just plan to name our kids Larry, Darryl, and Darryl.
I can think of a much better way to make an anti-spam statement with a Porsche, rather than AOL's raffle.
What I'd like to see is the sale of tickets to take out their spam-induced frustrations on the car. I'd pay $5 or $10 to beat upon the spammer's ill-gotten gains with a baseball bat, or to help fill the passenger compartment with a certain alleged meat product from a can.
The festivities could culminate with a bang, say like exploding the spamobile in an expression of what most people would love to do to spammers.
Of course, there would still be the question of what to do with the proceeds of such an event. Using the net profit to pay to flood known spammers' snail-mailboxes with AOL CD's, or to hire people to sneak saltpeter (or some other anaphrodesiac) into spammers' food would be poetic justice.
I predict a return of the old pheremone spams, if this catches on.
F*R*E*E sample attached to make you love your computer like no other!
Most of the spam on the net is illegal in the U.S. even under that travesty of legislation, the CAN-SPAM act.
I'm not getting rid of my spamfilters anytime soon. Are you?