For those of us who have had real phone numbers for a long time (my cell number dates back over 10 years), Google Voice is gee-whiz neat, but I'm not going to send out a whole new number to people who already *have* my cell number, so it really limits its functionality.
Porting my cell number to Google Voice and then giving my cell number a new throwaway number makes much more sense.
The problem is, this is a 'beta' service -- when will it go non-beta and can we count on it being an ongoing facility? It would suck to find out after getting used to it (either with or without porting) that Google is going to fold the service.
For now, it's a fun toy and I use it to buy and sell stuff on Craigslist to shield my real phone numbers. The SMS feature is nice.
The issue isn't a simple matter of area / people; a significant part of Africa is non-arable desert, unlike Europe which is capable of supporting agriculture nearly everywhere (and in areas where it isn't, it can support fishing or other non-farm forms of subsistence).
Most of populated Africa is involved in subsistence farming. At a certain point, the available arable land can't be further subdivided, and that's the issue at hand. These people now have two choices (if they have two) -- stay in their village, working in some menial fashion for family members with arable land, provided the land will produce enough food to feed them all, or move to the city.
Once in the city, they're homeless or the next best thing, assembling what passes for a home in a shantytown. Most of which are dominated by gangs, leaving them to either get involved with crime and/or politics (since most of the low-level "brownshirt" thugs in African politics really are just recruited from gangs by corrupt politicians who protect the gangs).
When I first got DSL in 1999, I paid for a premium service but performance was measurably half of what it should have been.
After a lot of back and forth (the ISP was my corporate ISP as well and I used that as leverage) it turned out they had a switch port with a duplex mismatch. And this was at an ISP that had been supplying Internet connectivity since the beginning, formed as a consortium with a university and other high tech busineses in the late 80s.
So fuckups can happen. And one can only guess they happen more and worse at behomoths like AT&T.
Getting rid of the kleptocratic dictatorships goes a long way towards letting Africans solve their own problems.
We might also quit making them live longer, or at least couple it with intensive support for birth control, because while as nice as it is not to die of sleeping sickness or malaria, its very nearly as bad to overpopulate the countryside, forcing unemployed & landless citizens to hang around shantytowns, living in poverty, getting AIDS, joining a criminal gang and/or whatever the local revolutionary militia is this month.
Really, if fucking Westerners would quit thinking they needed to "fix" Africa, we might see Africa fix itself.
I'd also like all the lefties who backed the "people's revolutionary movements" in Africa to step up and take some credit for the shithole they created. My guess is that the overwhelming majority of, say, Zimbabweans would much rather live in a nation run by Ian Smith than one run by Robert Mugabe.
You know they've run extortion against business guys, politicians and bureaucrats for years using all manner of hired female talent.
The gimmick is Bob the Middle Manager & Happily Married Guy on video cornholing some girl, or even better, a boy. This is used as leverage to control Bob so he can be a mole, giving you valuable info, inside access, etc.
This beats trojaning his computer as you now have a live operator inside the organization who will do anything to keep his wife/boss/kids from finding out his a cheat or a homo.
The geeks buy it so they can do something Linux-y on it, but they actually USE iPhones because they work and are trivial to use.
Last I checked the N900 was fairly worthless for connecting to Exchange, which, sad though it may well be, is kind of a critical must-have for a "smart" phone.
The old, Andrea Dworkin, men-hating, anti-pornography lesbian feminism is over. As it turns out, the philosophy really was driven by the psychology of angry lesbians who could only find empowerment by striking at heterosexual women capable of controlling their sexual destiny.
Diablo Cody, screenwriter of "Juno" is the exact personification of the new feminism. Stripper, writer, she's "in control" of her sexuality and is fine with using it for *her* own ends, even if on the surface it appears to be just furthering the old stereotypes. That doesn't matter because the men are really the manipulated victims (paying for sexual titillation) and the women are in charge.
Excuse me, gotta run, I have an English Lit class.
Gateway drugs are a different phenomenon, and as you point out, one that has been largely refuted. The "Gateway Drug" idea is where use of "soft" drugs leads to the use of "hard" drugs, usually with the idea that the "high" wears off the soft drugs and the user seeks harder drugs to keep getting high.
The lack-of-respect-for-law argument the poster was making is actually related to drugs as well. In the drug world it's been argued that the continued criminalization of marijuana reduces the respect for law because when people actually use it and find out that it doesn't turn them into raging psychopaths or heroin addicts, they intellectually lose respect for the law and question the validity of other laws. They are also more prone to engage in the black market since that's where marijuana is sold, which undercuts their practical respect for the law (ie, become willing to engage in breaking the law).
The "gateway drug" argument kind of makes some logical sense when you combine it with the lack-of-respect-for-law argument. If people are told wildly inaccurate things about marijuana but find out that none of them are true (psychosis, addiction, this-is-your-brain-on-drugs, etc) they are less inclined to believe cautionary statements about drugs which actually do have more serious consequences if not used carefully (ie, opiate addiction, heart damage from cocaine, etc).
Anyway, the GP poster's point is true generally -- to the extent that governments pass idiotic laws that everyone breaks, the more likely everyone will be to break laws that are less idiotic.
What I love about these articles is the rage people have about Microsoft and the sense of disdain they feel for "Microsoft Shops who have never looked outside their restricted world" which I loosely translate as "seen the wisdom of the conclusions I've reached about Linux".
Jeezus, man, if you're going to get fucking angry, get angry about something that MATTERS, like why Goldman Sachs got over $13 billion in TARP money from the bailout of AIG and how this money ended up in the pockets of Goldman execs who instead should have been unemployed for staggeringly poor business decisions.
The mouse sounds kind of cool and I hope it has PC support. Perhaps the touch interface will be customizable so that you can configure the touch zones so it works like a normal 3 button mouse.
I feel the same way. I used to end up flat on my back miserable for a week every year and then I started getting flu shots and that ended. It's totally worth the money, if you have to spend any.
I used to try to get the shots at my doctor's office (as they were free on my insurance plan) but after getting burned one year due to a mix of vaccine shortages and the doctor's schedule, I switched to just getting the shot the first place I ran across holding a clinic, even if it cost me out of pocket money. $30 or whatever they cost is totally worth it versus a week of real misery.
Sure there's a market for it on the server end of the PC equation, as well as on high-end workstation-type PCs. Think iSCSI. Right now most of the implementations are limited to 1Gbit due to Ethernet limitations.
10Gb would be great for virtualization environments, especially when doing VMotion or heavy disk I/O.
I was a long-time Verizon customer (dating back to Airtouch Cellular). As an IT consultant I'm all over the Twin Cities metro area and there were a number of places where Verizon's network was weak and dropped calls like crazy (Highland Park, by the water reservoir -- complete VZW deadzone) and a number of customer buildings where coverage was crap.
I eventually got sick of the shit-flavored crippled handset choices and gave into the iPhone. Despite the massive complaints you seem to hear about AT&T's network, at least for me it's been actually better than Verizon from a network perspective. The Verizon dead buildings & zones are no longer dead, I'd call data throughput dead even (although with different hardware, it's tough to make a apples-apples comparison), and I can use data service ON THE PHONE, which I couldn't do with Verizon.
About the only drawback is one particular customer whose building seems a perfect AT&T shield; but outside that one spot, AT&T has the advantage.
You have to wonder if at a certain point that simply building office campuses, staffing them with employees, PCs, etc, even if the jobs they do are pointless wouldn't actually be as economically effective as bureaucratic jobs, where people usually wonder if the work they do matters.
The larger economic purpose of the "real" jobs may not get done, but the economic consumption would be about the same.
If there was more direct data in/out to the device, versus "securely" routing everything through RIM. That model seems like it makes sense in a 1999 way, but now it just makes it awkward to use them outside of a BES environment.
The iPhone may be a closed platform, but at least data I/O isn't forced through Apple's servers.
OK, MS dumps millions -- tens, maybe over a hundred million, anyone? -- into antipiracy efforts for Windows 7. I'm talking direct work on Win7 to stop piracy (activation codes, backend infrastructure, employees, coding specific to Win7, etc).
We know it won't stop piracy, although we don't know if it will slow it. And then they turn around and price the product at outrageous prices, which only serves to punish and/or discourage the users who would purchase it and encourage fence sitters and experimenters to pirate it.
Why not price it much more generously and make it "one" product versus many, with installation options for multimedia, and make "home" a mode or something?
I'm thinking single copies at maybe $50 and five license packs for $150. I think they would probably sell more, and in the long run probably *make* more versus dumping a ton of money into antipiracy efforts and then pricing it sky high.
Look, we had a dustup over this in the late 18th century. A few of us got together and decided, among other things, that were endowed by our creator with certain inalienable rights, among which are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. We wanted to be CITIZENS, not SUBJECTS.
The British didn't believe in this. They believed in something else, some lesser form of liberty restricted by their aristocracy and parliament.
It's just refreshing to see a British subject admit to it.
We always started the year out right by liberating one of the nice fiberglass trays from the student union cafeteria. Worked way better than an LP cover and the lip kept seeds and stems out of your lap.
You had to get a fiberglass tray as opposed to one of the plastic ones; only the fiberglass trays had a hard, smooth surface that could be scraped clean with your student ID. The plastic trays usually had some lame pebbly finish or some other embossed design that prevented a thorough cleaning.
LP covers were the worst option -- no lip, often textured paper, or worse, something like "Sticky Fingers" with some kind of non-flat surface.
The best issues are right after Playboy started showing bush; the first few years there was none. The girls were all real -- no cosmetic surgery and the airbrushing seemed minimal (since it probably WAS airbrushing, and not digital tools), and the bushes were full.
I think for a lot of the real young guys (I suppose college age) its pretty strange seeing women with so much pubic hair. All the porn girls these days seem to be shaved, including/especially the amateurs, and my parents-of-high-school-age-girls sources tell me that shaving is pretty much the standard and no girl would be caught dead these days with a full bush.
It seems that every customer I run into with a glitchy backup environment wants to do "online" backup because it requires less investment and the presumption that their data is "safer" offsite. Our occasionally braindead sales often jumps on this bandwagon and I get the virtual equivalent of kicks under the table when I ask about versioning, disaster recovery, data formats, on-site data delivery (ie, all data at once), Active Directory, Exchange, SQL, and metadata recovery. I don't even get into security..
I always get muddy answers when I ask these questions; it may be fine for casual use in the 100GB arena where one only expects or needs the most basic of file recovery, but seems entirely primitive and restrictive when talking larger data sets, disaster recovery, etc.
I'd feel better about these solutions if they would periodically and as requested deliver media in at least the server's native backup system format, or even better, in a local backup system's (ie, BackupExec) native format for sanity testing, versioning, and testing of data integrity.
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What kind of gross revenue are you looking at on an annualized basis?
Amen. Voicemail forwarding is a hack.
For those of us who have had real phone numbers for a long time (my cell number dates back over 10 years), Google Voice is gee-whiz neat, but I'm not going to send out a whole new number to people who already *have* my cell number, so it really limits its functionality.
Porting my cell number to Google Voice and then giving my cell number a new throwaway number makes much more sense.
The problem is, this is a 'beta' service -- when will it go non-beta and can we count on it being an ongoing facility? It would suck to find out after getting used to it (either with or without porting) that Google is going to fold the service.
For now, it's a fun toy and I use it to buy and sell stuff on Craigslist to shield my real phone numbers. The SMS feature is nice.
The issue isn't a simple matter of area / people; a significant part of Africa is non-arable desert, unlike Europe which is capable of supporting agriculture nearly everywhere (and in areas where it isn't, it can support fishing or other non-farm forms of subsistence).
Most of populated Africa is involved in subsistence farming. At a certain point, the available arable land can't be further subdivided, and that's the issue at hand. These people now have two choices (if they have two) -- stay in their village, working in some menial fashion for family members with arable land, provided the land will produce enough food to feed them all, or move to the city.
Once in the city, they're homeless or the next best thing, assembling what passes for a home in a shantytown. Most of which are dominated by gangs, leaving them to either get involved with crime and/or politics (since most of the low-level "brownshirt" thugs in African politics really are just recruited from gangs by corrupt politicians who protect the gangs).
When I first got DSL in 1999, I paid for a premium service but performance was measurably half of what it should have been.
After a lot of back and forth (the ISP was my corporate ISP as well and I used that as leverage) it turned out they had a switch port with a duplex mismatch. And this was at an ISP that had been supplying Internet connectivity since the beginning, formed as a consortium with a university and other high tech busineses in the late 80s.
So fuckups can happen. And one can only guess they happen more and worse at behomoths like AT&T.
Getting rid of the kleptocratic dictatorships goes a long way towards letting Africans solve their own problems.
We might also quit making them live longer, or at least couple it with intensive support for birth control, because while as nice as it is not to die of sleeping sickness or malaria, its very nearly as bad to overpopulate the countryside, forcing unemployed & landless citizens to hang around shantytowns, living in poverty, getting AIDS, joining a criminal gang and/or whatever the local revolutionary militia is this month.
Really, if fucking Westerners would quit thinking they needed to "fix" Africa, we might see Africa fix itself.
I'd also like all the lefties who backed the "people's revolutionary movements" in Africa to step up and take some credit for the shithole they created. My guess is that the overwhelming majority of, say, Zimbabweans would much rather live in a nation run by Ian Smith than one run by Robert Mugabe.
You know they've run extortion against business guys, politicians and bureaucrats for years using all manner of hired female talent.
The gimmick is Bob the Middle Manager & Happily Married Guy on video cornholing some girl, or even better, a boy. This is used as leverage to control Bob so he can be a mole, giving you valuable info, inside access, etc.
This beats trojaning his computer as you now have a live operator inside the organization who will do anything to keep his wife/boss/kids from finding out his a cheat or a homo.
The geeks buy it so they can do something Linux-y on it, but they actually USE iPhones because they work and are trivial to use.
Last I checked the N900 was fairly worthless for connecting to Exchange, which, sad though it may well be, is kind of a critical must-have for a "smart" phone.
Mod parent up.
The old, Andrea Dworkin, men-hating, anti-pornography lesbian feminism is over. As it turns out, the philosophy really was driven by the psychology of angry lesbians who could only find empowerment by striking at heterosexual women capable of controlling their sexual destiny.
Diablo Cody, screenwriter of "Juno" is the exact personification of the new feminism. Stripper, writer, she's "in control" of her sexuality and is fine with using it for *her* own ends, even if on the surface it appears to be just furthering the old stereotypes. That doesn't matter because the men are really the manipulated victims (paying for sexual titillation) and the women are in charge.
Excuse me, gotta run, I have an English Lit class.
No, the GP poster has a point.
Gateway drugs are a different phenomenon, and as you point out, one that has been largely refuted. The "Gateway Drug" idea is where use of "soft" drugs leads to the use of "hard" drugs, usually with the idea that the "high" wears off the soft drugs and the user seeks harder drugs to keep getting high.
The lack-of-respect-for-law argument the poster was making is actually related to drugs as well. In the drug world it's been argued that the continued criminalization of marijuana reduces the respect for law because when people actually use it and find out that it doesn't turn them into raging psychopaths or heroin addicts, they intellectually lose respect for the law and question the validity of other laws. They are also more prone to engage in the black market since that's where marijuana is sold, which undercuts their practical respect for the law (ie, become willing to engage in breaking the law).
The "gateway drug" argument kind of makes some logical sense when you combine it with the lack-of-respect-for-law argument. If people are told wildly inaccurate things about marijuana but find out that none of them are true (psychosis, addiction, this-is-your-brain-on-drugs, etc) they are less inclined to believe cautionary statements about drugs which actually do have more serious consequences if not used carefully (ie, opiate addiction, heart damage from cocaine, etc).
Anyway, the GP poster's point is true generally -- to the extent that governments pass idiotic laws that everyone breaks, the more likely everyone will be to break laws that are less idiotic.
What I love about these articles is the rage people have about Microsoft and the sense of disdain they feel for "Microsoft Shops who have never looked outside their restricted world" which I loosely translate as "seen the wisdom of the conclusions I've reached about Linux".
Jeezus, man, if you're going to get fucking angry, get angry about something that MATTERS, like why Goldman Sachs got over $13 billion in TARP money from the bailout of AIG and how this money ended up in the pockets of Goldman execs who instead should have been unemployed for staggeringly poor business decisions.
The mouse sounds kind of cool and I hope it has PC support. Perhaps the touch interface will be customizable so that you can configure the touch zones so it works like a normal 3 button mouse.
Cool hardware, what do you use for usable software? ;-)
I feel the same way. I used to end up flat on my back miserable for a week every year and then I started getting flu shots and that ended. It's totally worth the money, if you have to spend any.
I used to try to get the shots at my doctor's office (as they were free on my insurance plan) but after getting burned one year due to a mix of vaccine shortages and the doctor's schedule, I switched to just getting the shot the first place I ran across holding a clinic, even if it cost me out of pocket money. $30 or whatever they cost is totally worth it versus a week of real misery.
Sure there's a market for it on the server end of the PC equation, as well as on high-end workstation-type PCs. Think iSCSI. Right now most of the implementations are limited to 1Gbit due to Ethernet limitations.
10Gb would be great for virtualization environments, especially when doing VMotion or heavy disk I/O.
I was a long-time Verizon customer (dating back to Airtouch Cellular). As an IT consultant I'm all over the Twin Cities metro area and there were a number of places where Verizon's network was weak and dropped calls like crazy (Highland Park, by the water reservoir -- complete VZW deadzone) and a number of customer buildings where coverage was crap.
I eventually got sick of the shit-flavored crippled handset choices and gave into the iPhone. Despite the massive complaints you seem to hear about AT&T's network, at least for me it's been actually better than Verizon from a network perspective. The Verizon dead buildings & zones are no longer dead, I'd call data throughput dead even (although with different hardware, it's tough to make a apples-apples comparison), and I can use data service ON THE PHONE, which I couldn't do with Verizon.
About the only drawback is one particular customer whose building seems a perfect AT&T shield; but outside that one spot, AT&T has the advantage.
You have to wonder if at a certain point that simply building office campuses, staffing them with employees, PCs, etc, even if the jobs they do are pointless wouldn't actually be as economically effective as bureaucratic jobs, where people usually wonder if the work they do matters.
The larger economic purpose of the "real" jobs may not get done, but the economic consumption would be about the same.
> "Oooh, go on! You dirty minx! Oooh, you like that, do you?"
I just love British English!
I can actually hear that quote in a British accent in my head.
I also like the kind of snide, polite British put-down. For some reason Ricky Gervais seems to do it very well.
If there was more direct data in/out to the device, versus "securely" routing everything through RIM. That model seems like it makes sense in a 1999 way, but now it just makes it awkward to use them outside of a BES environment.
The iPhone may be a closed platform, but at least data I/O isn't forced through Apple's servers.
OK, MS dumps millions -- tens, maybe over a hundred million, anyone? -- into antipiracy efforts for Windows 7. I'm talking direct work on Win7 to stop piracy (activation codes, backend infrastructure, employees, coding specific to Win7, etc).
We know it won't stop piracy, although we don't know if it will slow it. And then they turn around and price the product at outrageous prices, which only serves to punish and/or discourage the users who would purchase it and encourage fence sitters and experimenters to pirate it.
Why not price it much more generously and make it "one" product versus many, with installation options for multimedia, and make "home" a mode or something?
I'm thinking single copies at maybe $50 and five license packs for $150. I think they would probably sell more, and in the long run probably *make* more versus dumping a ton of money into antipiracy efforts and then pricing it sky high.
Look, we had a dustup over this in the late 18th century. A few of us got together and decided, among other things, that were endowed by our creator with certain inalienable rights, among which are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. We wanted to be CITIZENS, not SUBJECTS.
The British didn't believe in this. They believed in something else, some lesser form of liberty restricted by their aristocracy and parliament.
It's just refreshing to see a British subject admit to it.
We always started the year out right by liberating one of the nice fiberglass trays from the student union cafeteria. Worked way better than an LP cover and the lip kept seeds and stems out of your lap.
You had to get a fiberglass tray as opposed to one of the plastic ones; only the fiberglass trays had a hard, smooth surface that could be scraped clean with your student ID. The plastic trays usually had some lame pebbly finish or some other embossed design that prevented a thorough cleaning.
LP covers were the worst option -- no lip, often textured paper, or worse, something like "Sticky Fingers" with some kind of non-flat surface.
The best issues are right after Playboy started showing bush; the first few years there was none. The girls were all real -- no cosmetic surgery and the airbrushing seemed minimal (since it probably WAS airbrushing, and not digital tools), and the bushes were full.
I think for a lot of the real young guys (I suppose college age) its pretty strange seeing women with so much pubic hair. All the porn girls these days seem to be shaved, including/especially the amateurs, and my parents-of-high-school-age-girls sources tell me that shaving is pretty much the standard and no girl would be caught dead these days with a full bush.
It seems that every customer I run into with a glitchy backup environment wants to do "online" backup because it requires less investment and the presumption that their data is "safer" offsite. Our occasionally braindead sales often jumps on this bandwagon and I get the virtual equivalent of kicks under the table when I ask about versioning, disaster recovery, data formats, on-site data delivery (ie, all data at once), Active Directory, Exchange, SQL, and metadata recovery. I don't even get into security..
I always get muddy answers when I ask these questions; it may be fine for casual use in the 100GB arena where one only expects or needs the most basic of file recovery, but seems entirely primitive and restrictive when talking larger data sets, disaster recovery, etc.
I'd feel better about these solutions if they would periodically and as requested deliver media in at least the server's native backup system format, or even better, in a local backup system's (ie, BackupExec) native format for sanity testing, versioning, and testing of data integrity.
That they would:
1) Ask him nicely to undo it.
2) When he refused, beat him fucking senseless.
3) The next day, ask him nicely again.
4) When he refuses, lock him in concrete box with no lights, no toilet and no heat. Hose with 2 degree celsius water every day. Minimum rations.
5) After 30 days of this, ask him nicely again.
6) If he refuses, tell him you're done asking and he can enjoy his fucking box for the rest of his 6 years. See step 4.
You'd probably have to look at server boards rather than desktop boards.
http://bit.ly/16EUiC
Link to Newegg with filtered set of ECC compatible server boards.
But you'll pay a lot more and probably need a larger case and a bunch of other BS, although it looks like there are some ATX factor boards.