I've been using Comodo AV for about a year, as part of their Comodo Internet Security, on several machines. It works ok, but does have a higher-than-average number of False Positives. To the extent that there's a False Positives section of their forum. I also find their HIPS "Defense Plus" more annoying than it should be, sometimes alerting after I've told it a program was OK and it should remember my choice.
But it is quite lightweight, and does the job. Price is right. Also nice to that it is not bloated with "Parental Control", "Privacy Protection", "Anti-Spam" and all kinds of other cruft.
Unless the company pushed something like DeviceLock out to the work PC to disallow writes to USB ports. Actually rather common. Then Firefox PE isn't going to work well, or even at all, because it can't write profile info, bookmarks, or anything else to the USB key.
Yeah because after all, it's impossible for there ever to be more than one SF series set on a space station. Just like there could only be one series that ever was set on a spaceship.
Geez the JMS fanboyz need to get a clue - he didn't invent space stations. The backstory and universe-building around DS9 and B5 are quite different. Oh, they both had wars. Guess what, he didn't invent war stories nor war SF either.
"I've lost count of the number of times I've accidentally attached to my neighbour's WAP"
Nonsense. Windows' default settings for wireless does not connect to any random access point. If you want it to do so you have to to the the Advanced settings and check off "Automatically connect to non-preferred networks". That's been true in XP SP2, XP SP1, XP no-stinkin'-SP, and even in the rudimentary "zero-config wireless" client that was in W2K.
I've never had a Windows box "accidentally" connect to anything. Now if you never changed your access point from a default of "default" or "Linksys" or "Netgear" and put it into your preferred access point list, and then your neighbor has the same - whose fault is that? Yours for not changing your own access point name to something that isn't going to show up at your clueless neighbors.
Since when does the NYCTA check Metrocards at exit? There are plenty of readers for the customers to check their cards if they want. But NYC doesn't have an "exit fare" system where you have to scan your card to leave the system.
Dish has an obligation to its customers to deliver the service for which they have signed up. We're geeks, we don't think twice about getting behind the equipment rack and adding in an OTA antenna or some other feed.
Joe and Jane Average American do not do this. Especially when over the past few years, since SHVIA, their locals started showing up on Dish (and Direct). Charlie Ergen spent plenty of money advertising that people could switch to Dish and still get their local channels. And in the last couple of years, almost all of their new-subscriber deals involved mandatory free professional installs. So they've got a customer base that can't be expected to know where all those wires go. They just rightly expect they're going to get their channels.
Heck I'm P.O'd and I'm a geek. I'm off on vacation and now my Replay TV, DishPVR, and MediaCenter PC are all recording various "Charlie Ergen pissing match" messages instead of the programming I had them set up for.
Charlie tends to drop the bomb. He has a reputation for being confrontational. A better-managed company would have negotiated this without putting their customers in the middle of it.
Do I agree with Viacom's bundling? No way! But did Dish drop the ball here too? Absolutely.
I didn't sign up for Dish thinking that every time a big network is renegotiating its contract I've got to expect that I might need to change providers. At that point, Comcast looks good.
Read it the first time. Doesn't mean SAG wouldn't be interested. This gives even more reason for them to protest against non-union shoots. Also it doesn't mention AFTRA, which represents actors in much television work.
Yes, contractually it may be a work-for-hire. But it's not right to re-use this for an entirely new client as an entirely new ad. The actors knew they were doing a spot for "client X". They wouldn't have had any idea that they also might be doing the same work for clients Y and Z.
Actors getting paid again?
on
Recycling TV Ads
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
Nowhere in the article nor on their site did I see anything about the actors getting additional residuals. Even in major cities, most "working actors" are barely making it, working day jobs in IT or restaurants or wherever, and occassionally getting a commercial for scale.
Wonder if the kung-fu guys knew their work was being reused years later. Whatever the original actors' contract said, it's certainly unfair to "re-purpose" these ads for additional advertisers without additional compensation. Wonder what SAG or AFTRA would have to say.
Your comment is talking about PC support issues, which is not really Information Technology in the sense that large companies think of it. The original poster sounds like he's talking about Requests - which sounds like Development. Development is part of IT, in fact it's the important part.
Having ownership of passwords has nothing to do with managing IT development & support requests from users.
Your biggest problem isn't what product you use to track requests. From what you posted, your real problem is that you assume:
request = work_must_be_performed.
Where's the point where the hundreds of requests are evaluated for ROI, prioritized as to the bank's stragegic and tactical business requirements, and championed by their requestors? I know I'm sounding like a PHB here, but you need prioritzation by the business first.
Place I work now has a committee of senior-level (not executive level) managers from the business who meet every 2 weeks to review these types of "queue requests". But before it even gets to them, we make the requester pass through some gates: they have to fill out a short form that makes them explain their requirements, what parts of the business will be helped, how much saved cost or gained revenue or oppportunity cost is involved, etc.
That gets sent to a Business Projects group, still in the business, not IT, who reality-checks it. If it makes sense to them, then they send it on to our group via a shared mailbox, and we do have a spreadsheet tracking system to log it and update it. We also have one person whose part-time job is to manage this queue from our team's perspective. It gets handed off to whatever development lead person is most familiar with the business issues and/or systems involved, and then that person sets up a requirements & estimating meeting with the requesting user area.
Once we have that estimated, then we write up a standard sizing form, cost it out in real dollars, and give it back to the user and the Queue. It's the user's job to make the pitch to his own VP's and their peers at the next prioritization meeting, as to why the company's money should be spent on this. If they OK it, then and only then do we assign a developer to do it.
This may sound bureaucratic, but it works real well. We get lots of work done that actually helps the business, without doing all kinds of chaotic development that one "squeeky wheel" claimed he must have but really wasn't important. It did take a couple of years to train the business to get it, and to get our group to learn to say NO politely by saying "that sounds like an interesting idea - why don't you write it up for the queue".
It doesn't matter the actual communication/tracking product - you could use ClearQuest, Bugzilla, Notes, emails, Outlook assigned tasks, whatever. What matters is that there is a process with a built-in review/justification, rather than phone-call=work-starts.
Whereas when I used to work at a Major Bank, we had a dysfunctional process where nobody truly justified things but everybody jockeyed to get their project "added to the list" as a "Priority A" "Rank One" project. I had a ridiculously long list of projects all labeled A1, with endless nonsense meetings where suits tried to make their A1 better than someone elses A1. B and C projects and numbers beyond 1 were banished years before I got there. My job was "maintenance project leader" which lasted one month before I walked out in disgust. But they had cool tracking tools.
Couldn't you see the rather obvious box for selecting different text contrast/size? He uses alternate stylesheets. That even works in IE6. So no problem in the "most prominent browser".
No reason not to trust or use samba. I'm using samba on my two linux boxes, Thursby Software's DAVE which allows MS-style SMB networking on my Mac OS9 box, and native MS-networking over TCP/IP on my WinXP, Win200, and WinMe (don't laugh) boxes. Don't have OS X and my old iMac is a bit underpowered to upgrade, but if I had it I'd probably be using samba with it - doesn't it come with OS X now?
Everybody's happy, everybody's talking, the old POS WinMe machine in the livingroom is playing MP3s coming from my Linux fileserver on what it thinks is a mapped windows network drive. And my Win2k laptop is printing to a laserprinter hung off the linux box, or to the HP multifunction on the WinXP box.
Everything's automagically on the net, and everything's talking to everything else. My wife knows that to back up a document she writes on her XP laptop, she drags it over to the "My Backups" icon I put on her desktop - she doesn't have to know that's really on my Linux fileserver.
Of course I'm blocking a bunch of ports including 137-139 and 445 at the firewall, using passwords that are reasonably secure, using WEP (yes I know it's not perfect but it deters "doorknob rattlers") on the wireless part of the network. All hooked through a couple of daisy-chained 5 port switches and 100Mb ethernet. Both a Nexland hardware router/firewall and Linux software firewall rules and IPMasq between the internal lan and the internet.
As much as you might want to avoid a protocol from the "empire", windows-style networking is the lowest common denominator. So you can get it to work across pretty much everything. No reason not to use it as long as you pay reasonable care to security and patch levels.
Absolutely. About the only choice in the system should be maybe ask the team if they'd like to rotate weekly or monthly.
Otherwise you're just overcomplicating it. Let people sort out their holidays by doing trades among themselves as long as they let you know.
But don't make it some complex mathematical scoring or other situation. You're just asking for accusations of unfairness if you do that. Somebody isn't going to "get" your carefully-thought-out system and feel it's working against them.
Where'd you get the incorrect idea that mobile-originated SMS sending is free in the US? It's not - depending on carrier it's usually 5 cents or 10 cents to send a message.
Of course you can buy packages that include a quota of SMS, but one way of the other, sending SMS is always incurring a cost, if you send from the phone.
But anybody can send an email to number@vtext.com or number@mobile.att.net, etc - I'd guess that most SMS spam is origninated either via email to the standardized email address of the phone's SMS, or via the carriers' websites for sending messages. I can't imagine the spammer is using an actual mobile to send them.
About a year ago all 6 nationwide carriers contracted with a 3rd-party service that provides SMS interoperability. You can send an SMS, for example from Verizon (CDMA) to T-Mobile (GSM) with just the phone number - no need for the email address. And it works to reply back the same way.
Works with Verizon, Cingular (TDMA & GSM), AT&T (TDMA & GSM), T-Mobile (GSM), Nextel(iDEN). It also works one-way to SprintPCS (CDMA) but Sprint doesn't support sending SMS. They can receive SMS but must use their Wireless Web to send message as emails.
Just because we don't have a single standard doesn't mean we don't have SMS. Yes, behind the scenes it uses the email gateways to cross carriers, but it's totally transparent to the user - just enter the phone number.
The feature D&M is considering dropping from Replay is Commercial Advance. That is an *automatic* playback skipover everything that the Replay thinks is a commercial.
I hear you, but Ughh! I can't see somebody with the mindset of a real developer getting any job satisfaction from an operator job. No creativity involved.
The job of a mainframe operator has absolutely nothing to do with programming. They run jobs, hang tapes (well nowadays robots move cartridges but someone has to monitor those pesky robots).
Mainframe coder: writes programs in COBOL, C++, Java, etc.using SQL, XML, MQ, various other technologies. Writes JCL (Job control Language e.g. m/f equiv of shell scripts) that will run those programs.
Mainframe operator: monitors the running of those jobs.
Totally different jobs. Once in a while an operator will study programming and become a coder, but there's no inherent career track operator-to-programmer.
"I have limited my intake of news to ABC, BBC, PBS, and Times/Post/Herald news articles on the internet."
Oh yeah, you're avoiding the media control of the Capitalist Republic with those choices. ABC?? You include frelling DISNEY as one of your non-biased and non-media-giant sources?
You've just repeated a common fallacy. There is no right to drive a car, it's a privilege. Whereas in the US, there is a RIGHT to defend oneself and one's loved ones and home. Including, as others have stated, against tyranny.
Now I have no problem with requiring a gun safety training class in order to own firearms. I voluntarily took one even before my state started requiring it. But requiring a safety class is an objective standard. That's appropriate to require to prove that the citizen is prepared to safely exercise this potentially dangerous right. But in much of the US, especially under "tougher" gun control laws, the government has granted itself subjective control of who has the right to own a firearm. And that opens up government abuse, restrictions of rights because a given municipality's police chief doesn't believe that the citizens whom he serves are capable, favoritism and cronyism.
It should work like this: if you've passed the mandatory standardized safety class, and you're not a convicted felon, the registering authority (usually the local police chief) should be required to issue the license. Not "may-issue" the license if he likes you or you're the right politics for his taste or not issue if he's against self defense. But "must-issue" (or as it's often termed "shall-issue") if you've passed the objective requirements.
In which case there's no need for this unreliable technology. The person has passed the test, he/she knows how to safely store and use a gun and the laws around using it.
What kind of a privacy-invading maroon puts a public-accessible link on his site to his web logs? The violation in question is that he let his web logs be searchable and publicly viewable, rather than keeping them in private filespace.
Not Google's fault if it indexes a page where the webmaster at the site violated your privacy.
I've got web-accessible logs at some of my sites, for my own and my clients' convenience, but they are unlinked URLs and in most cases password-protected. Voila, no Google indexing.
Typical modern euro-arrogance. "you still live in a 80's world..."
Now if he/she/it only thought about it for a moment- GSM or CDMA or W-CDMA or anything else - they're all dependent on centralized servers, switches, cell sites and controllers.
As others have noted, 9/11 overloaded ALL our cell systems on all technologies, including the GSM system in NYC (at the time, Voicestream, now T-Mobile and also now Cingular & AT&T as well), not just the "80's" style cellular. BTW, "80's" cellular in both US and Europe was analog FM, so get off your high horse. Anybody with a cellphone in NYC today is on a signal that is either CDMA-based (Sprint or Verizon), TDMA air-interface with GSM protocols (T-Mobile, AT&T, Cingular), or TDMA air-interface with N.American IS-136 protocols (AT&T's older network).
Original poster's comment about using a pager network is because the pager networks are optimized for text message delivery with "guaranteed" delivery.
SMS via the cell networks (which BTW we DO have here) works pretty well, but is not guaranteed immediate delivery, which is why many businesses still require or encourage text pagers or blackberries rather than SMS.
SMS over the cell networks *was* a major factor in restoring communication on 9/11. A number of news articles reported that people discovered that their SMS texts got through even though the voice channels were too congested or signal too weak due to lost cell sites to make voice calls.
However, an emergency communication system should NOT be dependent on some other part of the infrastructure being up and operational. Whether that be beloved-by-Europe-GSM, US/Asian CDMA standards, Europe's new WDCDMA (based on US-developed CDMA tech), TDMA, or the pager networks, or Nextel-style iDEN.
Thus the poster who suggested getting an amateur radio license is spot-on. If your emergency preparations include always maintaining charged batteries for your handheld transceivers (HT) and or mobile stations (e.g. car battery power), you can establish communications. There are regular practice sessions, traffic networks for message passing, and events like the ARRL's "Field Day" for practicing this. Of course, all family members would need a ham license but it's something anyone vaguely intelligent can get. People often use "repeaters" which are volunteer and group-owned re-transmitters. So that's "infrastructure" of a sort, but it's distributed, not controlled by the government or corporations, and thus somebody's repeater is still up even if the one on the top of the skyscraper is down. Plus there are common non-repeater ("simplex") calling frequencies like 146.52 MHz and agreed-upon sections of the bands for direct simplex.
Another option would be the licenseless FRS radios so often seen at ski areas. Limited range, but workable as you get back uptown towards home, perhaps. And maybe the higher-power GMRS radios that share some frequencies with FRS but have much more range. They need to be licensed but there are no operator test requirements.
Of course perhaps in Europe, GSM magically works even when your city is bombed, power and fiber lines are destroyed, and the main telco switching center is disabled.
Yes, but for those who remember 1994, Warp was the easiest way to get onto the internet. Remember, Windows didn't come with a TCP/IP stack until August 1995. And Netscape was no prize back in 1994 either.
This bundled OS/2 internet access package was a lot easier than downloading and installing Trumpet Winsock, manually configuring dial-up scripts, and using Netscape 2. And a lot more stable. Point-and-click setup if you signed up for IBM's consumer internet offering on the IBM Global Network (ibm.net, since sold to AT&T IIRC), and still configurable via the GUI if you used a local ISP who supported SLIP. PPP was a bit more trying, but also worked after an update to the IBM Dialer.
WebExplorer, 3rd-party email app PMMail, and the other OS/2-bundled web apps for Usenet, Archie, etc. were great. IBM's own email app did blow chunks, and truncated at about 60k into large emails, but otherwise the OS/2 Internet Access Suite was totally usable. And PMMail was a cheap download that was a modern, 3-pane layout mailer that would be immediately familiar to anybody using Eudora or even today's Outlook Express.
I know a number of people who got OS/2, especially the "OS/2 for Windows" add-on version, just to get onto the Net.
Slashdot Mirror
I've been using Comodo AV for about a year, as part of their Comodo Internet Security, on several machines. It works ok, but does have a higher-than-average number of False Positives. To the extent that there's a False Positives section of their forum. I also find their HIPS "Defense Plus" more annoying than it should be, sometimes alerting after I've told it a program was OK and it should remember my choice.
But it is quite lightweight, and does the job. Price is right. Also nice to that it is not bloated with "Parental Control", "Privacy Protection", "Anti-Spam" and all kinds of other cruft.
Unless the company pushed something like DeviceLock out to the work PC to disallow writes to USB ports. Actually rather common. Then Firefox PE isn't going to work well, or even at all, because it can't write profile info, bookmarks, or anything else to the USB key.
Yeah because after all, it's impossible for there ever to be more than one SF series set on a space station. Just like there could only be one series that ever was set on a spaceship.
Geez the JMS fanboyz need to get a clue - he didn't invent space stations. The backstory and universe-building around DS9 and B5 are quite different. Oh, they both had wars. Guess what, he didn't invent war stories nor war SF either.
"I've lost count of the number of times I've accidentally attached to my neighbour's WAP"
Nonsense. Windows' default settings for wireless does not connect to any random access point. If you want it to do so you have to to the the Advanced settings and check off "Automatically connect to non-preferred networks". That's been true in XP SP2, XP SP1, XP no-stinkin'-SP, and even in the rudimentary "zero-config wireless" client that was in W2K.
I've never had a Windows box "accidentally" connect to anything. Now if you never changed your access point from a default of "default" or "Linksys" or "Netgear" and put it into your preferred access point list, and then your neighbor has the same - whose fault is that? Yours for not changing your own access point name to something that isn't going to show up at your clueless neighbors.
Keep It Coming has serialized novels in several different genres available by subscriptions. Not free, but relatively low-priced.
Since when does the NYCTA check Metrocards at exit? There are plenty of readers for the customers to check their cards if they want. But NYC doesn't have an "exit fare" system where you have to scan your card to leave the system.
Dish has an obligation to its customers to deliver the service for which they have signed up. We're geeks, we don't think twice about getting behind the equipment rack and adding in an OTA antenna or some other feed.
Joe and Jane Average American do not do this. Especially when over the past few years, since SHVIA, their locals started showing up on Dish (and Direct). Charlie Ergen spent plenty of money advertising that people could switch to Dish and still get their local channels. And in the last couple of years, almost all of their new-subscriber deals involved mandatory free professional installs. So they've got a customer base that can't be expected to know where all those wires go. They just rightly expect they're going to get their channels.
Heck I'm P.O'd and I'm a geek. I'm off on vacation and now my Replay TV, DishPVR, and MediaCenter PC are all recording various "Charlie Ergen pissing match" messages instead of the programming I had them set up for.
Charlie tends to drop the bomb. He has a reputation for being confrontational. A better-managed company would have negotiated this without putting their customers in the middle of it.
Do I agree with Viacom's bundling? No way! But did Dish drop the ball here too? Absolutely.
I didn't sign up for Dish thinking that every time a big network is renegotiating its contract I've got to expect that I might need to change providers. At that point, Comcast looks good.
Read it the first time. Doesn't mean SAG wouldn't be interested. This gives even more reason for them to protest against non-union shoots. Also it doesn't mention AFTRA, which represents actors in much television work.
Yes, contractually it may be a work-for-hire. But it's not right to re-use this for an entirely new client as an entirely new ad. The actors knew they were doing a spot for "client X". They wouldn't have had any idea that they also might be doing the same work for clients Y and Z.
Nowhere in the article nor on their site did I see anything about the actors getting additional residuals. Even in major cities, most "working actors" are barely making it, working day jobs in IT or restaurants or wherever, and occassionally getting a commercial for scale.
Wonder if the kung-fu guys knew their work was being reused years later. Whatever the original actors' contract said, it's certainly unfair to "re-purpose" these ads for additional advertisers without additional compensation. Wonder what SAG or AFTRA would have to say.
Your comment is talking about PC support issues, which is not really Information Technology in the sense that large companies think of it. The original poster sounds like he's talking about Requests - which sounds like Development. Development is part of IT, in fact it's the important part.
Having ownership of passwords has nothing to do with managing IT development & support requests from users.
I see this confusion all the time here.
Your biggest problem isn't what product you use to track requests. From what you posted, your real problem is that you assume:
request = work_must_be_performed.
Where's the point where the hundreds of requests are evaluated for ROI, prioritized as to the bank's stragegic and tactical business requirements, and championed by their requestors? I know I'm sounding like a PHB here, but you need prioritzation by the business first.
Place I work now has a committee of senior-level (not executive level) managers from the business who meet every 2 weeks to review these types of "queue requests". But before it even gets to them, we make the requester pass through some gates: they have to fill out a short form that makes them explain their requirements, what parts of the business will be helped, how much saved cost or gained revenue or oppportunity cost is involved, etc.
That gets sent to a Business Projects group, still in the business, not IT, who reality-checks it. If it makes sense to them, then they send it on to our group via a shared mailbox, and we do have a spreadsheet tracking system to log it and update it. We also have one person whose part-time job is to manage this queue from our team's perspective. It gets handed off to whatever development lead person is most familiar with the business issues and/or systems involved, and then that person sets up a requirements & estimating meeting with the requesting user area.
Once we have that estimated, then we write up a standard sizing form, cost it out in real dollars, and give it back to the user and the Queue. It's the user's job to make the pitch to his own VP's and their peers at the next prioritization meeting, as to why the company's money should be spent on this. If they OK it, then and only then do we assign a developer to do it.
This may sound bureaucratic, but it works real well. We get lots of work done that actually helps the business, without doing all kinds of chaotic development that one "squeeky wheel" claimed he must have but really wasn't important. It did take a couple of years to train the business to get it, and to get our group to learn to say NO politely by saying "that sounds like an interesting idea - why don't you write it up for the queue".
It doesn't matter the actual communication/tracking product - you could use ClearQuest, Bugzilla, Notes, emails, Outlook assigned tasks, whatever. What matters is that there is a process with a built-in review/justification, rather than phone-call=work-starts.
Whereas when I used to work at a Major Bank, we had a dysfunctional process where nobody truly justified things but everybody jockeyed to get their project "added to the list" as a "Priority A" "Rank One" project. I had a ridiculously long list of projects all labeled A1, with endless nonsense meetings where suits tried to make their A1 better than someone elses A1. B and C projects and numbers beyond 1 were banished years before I got there. My job was "maintenance project leader" which lasted one month before I walked out in disgust. But they had cool tracking tools.
It's not the tool, it's how you use it.
Couldn't you see the rather obvious box for selecting different text contrast/size? He uses alternate stylesheets. That even works in IE6. So no problem in the "most prominent browser".
But it's easier to complain...
No reason not to trust or use samba. I'm using samba on my two linux boxes, Thursby Software's DAVE which allows MS-style SMB networking on my Mac OS9 box, and native MS-networking over TCP/IP on my WinXP, Win200, and WinMe (don't laugh) boxes. Don't have OS X and my old iMac is a bit underpowered to upgrade, but if I had it I'd probably be using samba with it - doesn't it come with OS X now?
Everybody's happy, everybody's talking, the old POS WinMe machine in the livingroom is playing MP3s coming from my Linux fileserver on what it thinks is a mapped windows network drive. And my Win2k laptop is printing to a laserprinter hung off the linux box, or to the HP multifunction on the WinXP box.
Everything's automagically on the net, and everything's talking to everything else. My wife knows that to back up a document she writes on her XP laptop, she drags it over to the "My Backups" icon I put on her desktop - she doesn't have to know that's really on my Linux fileserver.
Of course I'm blocking a bunch of ports including 137-139 and 445 at the firewall, using passwords that are reasonably secure, using WEP (yes I know it's not perfect but it deters "doorknob rattlers") on the wireless part of the network. All hooked through a couple of daisy-chained 5 port switches and 100Mb ethernet. Both a Nexland hardware router/firewall and Linux software firewall rules and IPMasq between the internal lan and the internet.
As much as you might want to avoid a protocol from the "empire", windows-style networking is the lowest common denominator. So you can get it to work across pretty much everything. No reason not to use it as long as you pay reasonable care to security and patch levels.
Absolutely. About the only choice in the system should be maybe ask the team if they'd like to rotate weekly or monthly.
Otherwise you're just overcomplicating it. Let people sort out their holidays by doing trades among themselves as long as they let you know.
But don't make it some complex mathematical scoring or other situation. You're just asking for accusations of unfairness if you do that. Somebody isn't going to "get" your carefully-thought-out system and feel it's working against them.
Guess we haven't totally polluted the .com namespace after all. Bob's Bread and Cheese shop in Wisconsin really wanted bbc.com but some euro took it.
.com sites. Basta with the anti-americanism already.
And I guess then that the Italian Alps are really in the US? www.bormio.com
There are quite a few non-US
Where'd you get the incorrect idea that mobile-originated SMS sending is free in the US? It's not - depending on carrier it's usually 5 cents or 10 cents to send a message.
Of course you can buy packages that include a quota of SMS, but one way of the other, sending SMS is always incurring a cost, if you send from the phone.
But anybody can send an email to number@vtext.com or number@mobile.att.net, etc - I'd guess that most SMS spam is origninated either via email to the standardized email address of the phone's SMS, or via the carriers' websites for sending messages. I can't imagine the spammer is using an actual mobile to send them.
About a year ago all 6 nationwide carriers contracted with a 3rd-party service that provides SMS interoperability. You can send an SMS, for example from Verizon (CDMA) to T-Mobile (GSM) with just the phone number - no need for the email address. And it works to reply back the same way.
Works with Verizon, Cingular (TDMA & GSM), AT&T (TDMA & GSM), T-Mobile (GSM), Nextel(iDEN). It also works one-way to SprintPCS (CDMA) but Sprint doesn't support sending SMS. They can receive SMS but must use their Wireless Web to send message as emails.
Just because we don't have a single standard doesn't mean we don't have SMS. Yes, behind the scenes it uses the email gateways to cross carriers, but it's totally transparent to the user - just enter the phone number.
The feature D&M is considering dropping from Replay is Commercial Advance. That is an *automatic* playback skipover everything that the Replay thinks is a commercial.
The 30second skip feature is not being dropped.
I hear you, but Ughh! I can't see somebody with the mindset of a real developer getting any job satisfaction from an operator job. No creativity involved.
The job of a mainframe operator has absolutely nothing to do with programming. They run jobs, hang tapes (well nowadays robots move cartridges but someone has to monitor those pesky robots).
Mainframe coder: writes programs in COBOL, C++, Java, etc.using SQL, XML, MQ, various other technologies. Writes JCL (Job control Language e.g. m/f equiv of shell scripts) that will run those programs.
Mainframe operator: monitors the running of those jobs.
Totally different jobs. Once in a while an operator will study programming and become a coder, but there's no inherent career track operator-to-programmer.
"I have limited my intake of news to ABC, BBC, PBS, and Times/Post/Herald news articles on the internet."
Oh yeah, you're avoiding the media control of the Capitalist Republic with those choices. ABC?? You include frelling DISNEY as one of your non-biased and non-media-giant sources?
You've just repeated a common fallacy. There is no right to drive a car, it's a privilege. Whereas in the US, there is a RIGHT to defend oneself and one's loved ones and home. Including, as others have stated, against tyranny.
Now I have no problem with requiring a gun safety training class in order to own firearms. I voluntarily took one even before my state started requiring it. But requiring a safety class is an objective standard. That's appropriate to require to prove that the citizen is prepared to safely exercise this potentially dangerous right. But in much of the US, especially under "tougher" gun control laws, the government has granted itself subjective control of who has the right to own a firearm. And that opens up government abuse, restrictions of rights because a given municipality's police chief doesn't believe that the citizens whom he serves are capable, favoritism and cronyism.
It should work like this: if you've passed the mandatory standardized safety class, and you're not a convicted felon, the registering authority (usually the local police chief) should be required to issue the license. Not "may-issue" the license if he likes you or you're the right politics for his taste or not issue if he's against self defense. But "must-issue" (or as it's often termed "shall-issue") if you've passed the objective requirements.
In which case there's no need for this unreliable technology. The person has passed the test, he/she knows how to safely store and use a gun and the laws around using it.
What kind of a privacy-invading maroon puts a public-accessible link on his site to his web logs? The violation in question is that he let his web logs be searchable and publicly viewable, rather than keeping them in private filespace.
Not Google's fault if it indexes a page where the webmaster at the site violated your privacy.
I've got web-accessible logs at some of my sites, for my own and my clients' convenience, but they are unlinked URLs and in most cases password-protected. Voila, no Google indexing.
Typical modern euro-arrogance. "you still live in a 80's world..."
Now if he/she/it only thought about it for a moment- GSM or CDMA or W-CDMA or anything else - they're all dependent on centralized servers, switches, cell sites and controllers.
As others have noted, 9/11 overloaded ALL our cell systems on all technologies, including the GSM system in NYC (at the time, Voicestream, now T-Mobile and also now Cingular & AT&T as well), not just the "80's" style cellular. BTW, "80's" cellular in both US and Europe was analog FM, so get off your high horse. Anybody with a cellphone in NYC today is on a signal that is either CDMA-based (Sprint or Verizon), TDMA air-interface with GSM protocols (T-Mobile, AT&T, Cingular), or TDMA air-interface with N.American IS-136 protocols (AT&T's older network).
Original poster's comment about using a pager network is because the pager networks are optimized for text message delivery with "guaranteed" delivery.
SMS via the cell networks (which BTW we DO have here) works pretty well, but is not guaranteed immediate delivery, which is why many businesses still require or encourage text pagers or blackberries rather than SMS.
SMS over the cell networks *was* a major factor in restoring communication on 9/11. A number of news articles reported that people discovered that their SMS texts got through even though the voice channels were too congested or signal too weak due to lost cell sites to make voice calls.
However, an emergency communication system should NOT be dependent on some other part of the infrastructure being up and operational. Whether that be beloved-by-Europe-GSM, US/Asian CDMA standards, Europe's new WDCDMA (based on US-developed CDMA tech), TDMA, or the pager networks, or Nextel-style iDEN.
Thus the poster who suggested getting an amateur radio license is spot-on. If your emergency preparations include always maintaining charged batteries for your handheld transceivers (HT) and or mobile stations (e.g. car battery power), you can establish communications. There are regular practice sessions, traffic networks for message passing, and events like the ARRL's "Field Day" for practicing this. Of course, all family members would need a ham license but it's something anyone vaguely intelligent can get. People often use "repeaters" which are volunteer and group-owned re-transmitters. So that's "infrastructure" of a sort, but it's distributed, not controlled by the government or corporations, and thus somebody's repeater is still up even if the one on the top of the skyscraper is down. Plus there are common non-repeater ("simplex") calling frequencies like 146.52 MHz and agreed-upon sections of the bands for direct simplex.
Another option would be the licenseless FRS radios so often seen at ski areas. Limited range, but workable as you get back uptown towards home, perhaps. And maybe the higher-power GMRS radios that share some frequencies with FRS but have much more range. They need to be licensed but there are no operator test requirements.
Of course perhaps in Europe, GSM magically works even when your city is bombed, power and fiber lines are destroyed, and the main telco switching center is disabled.
Yes, but for those who remember 1994, Warp was the easiest way to get onto the internet. Remember, Windows didn't come with a TCP/IP stack until August 1995. And Netscape was no prize back in 1994 either.
This bundled OS/2 internet access package was a lot easier than downloading and installing Trumpet Winsock, manually configuring dial-up scripts, and using Netscape 2. And a lot more stable. Point-and-click setup if you signed up for IBM's consumer internet offering on the IBM Global Network (ibm.net, since sold to AT&T IIRC), and still configurable via the GUI if you used a local ISP who supported SLIP. PPP was a bit more trying, but also worked after an update to the IBM Dialer.
WebExplorer, 3rd-party email app PMMail, and the other OS/2-bundled web apps for Usenet, Archie, etc. were great. IBM's own email app did blow chunks, and truncated at about 60k into large emails, but otherwise the OS/2 Internet Access Suite was totally usable. And PMMail was a cheap download that was a modern, 3-pane layout mailer that would be immediately familiar to anybody using Eudora or even today's Outlook Express.
I know a number of people who got OS/2, especially the "OS/2 for Windows" add-on version, just to get onto the Net.