There are several arguments: One (as mentioned in the original article) is when you're travelling elsewhere and your phone is either prohibitively expensive to use if roaming, or you can't use your provider at all. You would want a local SIM card then. A second, and in my opinion extremely valid reason, is when the phone company fails to unlock or provide you with the means to unlock your phone after the contractual period has expired. I had to use one of those services myself on one occation because of this (my parents were stuck without a working phone in a foreign country, I managed to talk them through the unlock procedure over a borrowed phone).
And I also own one phone myself that is locked to one provider, five years after they were supposed to unlock it according to local telecommunication laws. Unfortunately the internet unlock companies don't have a procedure for this brand of phone.
RTFA. It was a short wave "scanner", i.e. a short wave receiver. There are no police or other "illegal" frequencies in the short wave band. This was not a police scanner, and thus not "illegal in the UK".
And you also got me worried. It wouldn't be surprising if eBay will now limit SkypeOut/SkypeIn charges to Paypal only. It even sounds obvious. Good for eBay/Paypal, a major step backwards from everyone else's standpoint (including mine, I have been perfectly happy using Mastercard to buy my SkypeOut credit).
There is other software out there. Some can do some of what Skype does, other software can do other parts of what Skype does. But can it do all of it?
- Skype has little or no problems with firewalls. Most workplaces wouldn't be able to use Skype if it wasn't for this. - It's not only PC-to-PC, which indeed is a dime a dozen. It's also PC-to-phone and even phone-to-PC. You can get your own phone number(s) in some countries, e.g. get yourself a phone number in some other country and your friends there can phone you at local rates instead of international. - With the latest version and its forwarding feature (still only in the Windows version) it's even phone-to-phone as well. - Skype's PC-to-phone is cheap. I can go to the other side of the world and phone my mum or anyone at home for close to nothing, with a USB stick w/Skype and an Internet cafe.
There are other applications out there that can do part of what Skype can do, but it's either - missing some features, or - not as good PC-to-phone country coverage, or - more expensive PC-to-phone rates, or - none or extremely (even more than Skype) limited availability of phone numbers (what Skype calls SkypeIn). - a smaller user base (which is a self-strengthening point)
In other words, a lot of stuff come together in Skype. The only point against I can think of is the missing interoperability with other software because of the proprietary protocols.
With a large US company owning Skype I think we can take for granted that getting SkypeIn sorted out with the telecomm authorities of smaller, European countries will simply not happen. I expect Skype will now grow much more US-oriented than before - I simply can't imagine why Ebay would bother with, or even understand those Euro-centric problems.
Time to start looking seriously at the existing competition, small as it is.
>I actually considered using Morse code (which I already know) on the side buttons, but they'd probably wear out too quickly.
Now that's a great idea you've got there! Imagine a mini-version of a morse code pad, connected to, or produding from the PDA. That would allow high speed
input of text (with some limitations w.r.t. available characters). (For the uninitiated, modern CW (morse code) pads are nothing at all like the old-style devices as seen in old black-and-white movies. Even a slow morse reader like myself can send code at maybe 150-180 chars a minute. When using it as an input device it doesn't matter that I wouldn't myself be able to receive CW at that speed. And learning to use a CW pad to write (send) text is easy-peasy, nothing at all like learning to receive CW.)
I have a 2400 and I get perfectly fine pictures. The trick is simply
to use iscan for linux: get it here
Using the standard xsane isn't good enough, unfortunately. But with
iscan you'll get the full performance out of your Epson. Just make sure
you follow the installation procedure.
>The french are even worse: 96 in French is quatre-vent seize, literally >four-twenty sixteen. Danish: "seks og halv fems" -> "Six and half-fives", where the latter refers to scores (20s). I.e. six plus four-and-a-half times twenty. 96.
But this is not the same thing. The parent referred to the practice
of not using spaces between proper words, not the German practice of
creating new, long words (nouns) from other words. Very different thing.
And it's not just the greeks that didn't use spaces between words in
sentences, just take a walk through Rome and read the old Latin inscriptions on old ruins. Long sentences, no spaces.
An interesting thing is that the "zombie", the name New Scientist used for the non-conscious part of you that is actually moving your tennis arm, walking the staircase, reaching for the glass of water and actually driving your car -- this part of you is _not_ fooled by most of these illusions. This has been shown by testing people with "blindsight", as well as people with normal vision. Thus, it may be that such tricks wouldn't work too well on the hockey field.
Read the article. The point is not to
replace the hearth, it's to assist the heart.
It was designed that way. Thus,
the comment you replied to was entirely relevant.
These Nigerian scam guys may look like a joke
to most of us, but they are dangerous criminals
who would, in fact, kill you if you make trouble
and they could get a hand on you. There have been
several occasions already, for example a Norwegian
businessman named Kjetil Moe in 1999. The guy was
65 years old and of the old school where he
thought that any problems could be resolved by
a face-to-face meeting. He actually travelled
to South-Africa to meet
these guys. He promptly went missing and was found
killed later. The newspaper coverage was quite
intensive at the time.
Here's one link.
>True, but funding UML seems kind of curious. After all, if you can >virtualize, then theoretically you're going to be buying fewer of >those Intel processors. So, what are those bunny-suited Intellers up to?
Weeell.. in my group we just bought a new Intel PC. We were going to anyway, but when we figured out we could use it for running lots of UML guest hosts on it for letting the developers get their own specific test environments we decided to upgrade the order to a huge hunky SMP Xeon machine. So, in this case UML got Intel more money out of the deal.
I learned touch typing on a mechanical typewriter and was completely fine with the capslock key there. However, I've been programming for nearly three decades by now, and I have never ever in all that time had need of the caps lock key. It's just unbelivable that computer keyboards still ship with a key called 'Caps Lock', and that the default XFree86 setup still includes caps lock. Everybody, add 'Option "XkbOptions" "ctrl:nocaps" to your/etc/X11/XF86Config-4 keyboard driver setup.
Great idea,but you should all add those scamsites to your list of non-proxied and/or cached sites, e.g. in your browser. Otherwise all your reloading will just serve the images from your cache, instead of from the actual fake bank sites. You could also use shift-reload, but then you would also load the artists-against-419 site as well.
Shame on whoever put that title ("Faster than DSL") on this posting. This is much worse than comparing apples and oranges, it's like saying "a ferrari is faster than a tarmac road".
DSL is a low-level protocol for utilizing the copper going to your house, and nothing in BIC-TCP is going to increase that speed.
BIC-TCP is a solution for the more and more common problem of really high bandwidth (say, up to hundreds of megabits, or gigabits per sec.), combined with relatively long round trip times. Like e.g. having a fiber from one continent to another, or high speed satellite links. With standard TCP/IP your transmission rate will basically be limited to 2^window_size_in_bits/RTT_in_seconds (see http://www.ieft.org/rfc/rfc1323.txt). Try some calculations and you'll find that this sucks majorly. BIC-TCP is meant as a way out of this problem. It won't make your copper go faster.
>No, in other words you would be better off like that. Not everyone has the same physique as you do, and just >because you personally wouldn't find it useful doesn't mean nobody else will.
You don't get it. That was a guy with a "normal" physique AFAIK, and he carried a backpack which contained the engine+power pack *only*. (nothing there indicated that they had added any additional load), and he *still* looked like he was carrying a heavy load! Did you see the concentration on his face? Ergo: With the current weight demands of the engine+power pack you're better off without the whole exoskeleton. If you could use it at all with any kind of leg disabilities isn't clear either.
>[developing] Of course they will try to improve the device in the future. That doesn't mean we won't comment on the current version..!
Enough power to carry the power source .. barely.
on
Powered Exoskeleton Legs
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
The video clearly showed that the power pack this device currently needs is so heavy that a guy wearing the skeleton+power pack looks the way I do when I carry 30+ kilos and no exoskeleton! In other words, he would be much better off if he left the exoskeleton+power back behind, and carried on using natural power only. As with a lot of other cool devices, the really big problem is the need for compact, efficient, lightweight power sources. They currently don't exist.
Wow. I looked at MS' proposal as well as SPF's, and darn if MS didn't
do much better. First: SPF's webpage is mostly slogans about how it
makes the world better, but you have to dig around a lot to find out
how their scheme works. Mostly you'll just find more
of the same self-hugging and no real technical info. Secondly: MS' scheme seems simple enough,
just one addition to DNS (list those mailservers allowed to send mails
from your domain), and a very nice, standard-compliant way of handling
the mobile-user problem: If you're away from home and you're sending
from your name12@somefreemail.com account, and you want your From: line
to be your standard Me.Myself@my-own-domain.cx, whatever actual account you're sending through, then just make sure that your Sender: is name12@somefreemail.com and you're set.
This is a nice alternative if you can't list your freemail ISP's mailserver in your DNS (maybe you don't know its IP address, or it's changing all the time). Maybe SPF's scheme is similar, but they sure didn't mention any Sender: header there. Seemed to be some home-cooked up non-standard header, and a lot of talking about forwarding not working etc. The only thing I didn't like with MS' scheme is the XML thing, why would you want to put XML in your DNS records? Nothing else in DNS is XML. Oh well.
You get fed up after a while, simple as that. I used to get hooked on games too, but that is many years past. Now past 40, I play the occasional frozen bubble, and (even rarer) tuxracer. But there are a lot of more interesting things to do out there than gaming.
.. why come up with a new, fancy, feature-full mobile phone, and then blow it all just before the
finish line by adding an external antenna? In 2004? Back in the bad, old days of 1997 you could only get phones with external
antennas, and boy was it annoying when those darn
things unstoppingly managed to dig a hole in your
pocket or whatever you kept it in.
The first phone company that came up with the internal antennas experienced a huge jump in market share, and I can't for the life of me understand why companies like Motorola are still making phones with ugly inconvinient external stickouts.
Come on, in the world outside of England, USA and Japan (and possibly oz), we all use 24 hour days!
Although we could orally sometimes say "six in the afternoon", we write18! The day (argh, English doesn't even have a proper word for day+night, 24 hours!) is 24 hours, it's not 12 hours. And for most of the world you simply think in 24 hours. (My watch now shows 23:31, it's getting late)
I totally disagree. It takes me milliseconds to see and understand the numbers (the four first are usually bigger on digital wristwatches), i.e. instant snapshot of time. With analogue watches I have to scrutinize the display to figure out what time it is, it takes several seconds. And I may still get it wrong, it's happened that I've shown up an hour early because I mis-read that damn (borrowed) analogue watch.
Digital forever.
Slashdot Mirror
There are several arguments: One (as mentioned in the original article) is when you're travelling elsewhere and your phone is either prohibitively expensive to use if roaming, or you can't use your provider at all. You would want a local SIM card then. A second, and in my opinion extremely valid reason, is when the phone company fails to unlock or provide you with the means to unlock your phone after the contractual period has expired. I had to use one of those services myself on one occation because of this (my parents were stuck without a working phone in a foreign country, I managed to talk them through the unlock procedure over a borrowed phone). And I also own one phone myself that is locked to one provider, five years after they were supposed to unlock it according to local telecommunication laws. Unfortunately the internet unlock companies don't have a procedure for this brand of phone.
RTFA. It was a short wave "scanner", i.e. a short wave receiver. There are no police or other "illegal" frequencies in the short wave band. This was not a police scanner, and thus not "illegal in the UK".
I think you're definitely on to something.
And you also got me worried. It wouldn't be surprising if eBay will now limit SkypeOut/SkypeIn charges to Paypal only. It even sounds obvious. Good for eBay/Paypal, a major step backwards from everyone else's standpoint (including mine, I have been perfectly happy using Mastercard to buy my SkypeOut credit).
There is other software out there. Some can do some of what Skype does, other software can do other parts of what Skype does. But can it do all of it?
- Skype has little or no problems with firewalls. Most workplaces wouldn't be able to use Skype if it wasn't for this.
- It's not only PC-to-PC, which indeed is a dime a dozen. It's also PC-to-phone and even phone-to-PC. You can get your own phone number(s) in some countries, e.g. get yourself a phone number in some other country and your friends there can phone you at local rates instead of international.
- With the latest version and its forwarding feature (still only in the Windows version) it's even phone-to-phone as well.
- Skype's PC-to-phone is cheap. I can go to the other side of the world and phone my mum or anyone at home for close to nothing, with a USB stick w/Skype and an Internet cafe.
There are other applications out there that can do part of what Skype can do, but it's either
- missing some features, or
- not as good PC-to-phone country coverage, or
- more expensive PC-to-phone rates, or
- none or extremely (even more than Skype) limited availability of phone numbers (what Skype calls SkypeIn).
- a smaller user base (which is a self-strengthening point)
In other words, a lot of stuff come together in Skype. The only point against I can think of is the missing interoperability with other software because of the proprietary protocols.
With a large US company owning Skype I think we can take for granted that getting SkypeIn sorted out with the telecomm authorities of smaller, European countries will simply not happen. I expect Skype will now grow much more US-oriented than before - I simply can't imagine why Ebay would bother with, or even understand those Euro-centric problems.
Time to start looking seriously at the existing competition, small as it is.
>This is a guy that makes a living writing mostly sci-fi.
Ender's game is not sci-fi. It's SF. Godzilla is sci-fi (as defined by Asimov), 2001: A Space Odyssey is SF.
sci-fi is a term invented by marketdroids.
TA
Now that's a great idea you've got there! Imagine a mini-version of a morse code pad, connected to, or produding from the PDA. That would allow high speed input of text (with some limitations w.r.t. available characters). (For the uninitiated, modern CW (morse code) pads are nothing at all like the old-style devices as seen in old black-and-white movies. Even a slow morse reader like myself can send code at maybe 150-180 chars a minute. When using it as an input device it doesn't matter that I wouldn't myself be able to receive CW at that speed. And learning to use a CW pad to write (send) text is easy-peasy, nothing at all like learning to receive CW.)
I have a 2400 and I get perfectly fine pictures. The trick is simply to use iscan for linux: get it here Using the standard xsane isn't good enough, unfortunately. But with iscan you'll get the full performance out of your Epson. Just make sure you follow the installation procedure.
>The french are even worse: 96 in French is quatre-vent seize, literally >four-twenty sixteen.
Danish: "seks og halv fems" -> "Six and half-fives", where the latter
refers to scores (20s). I.e. six plus four-and-a-half times twenty. 96.
But this is not the same thing. The parent referred to the practice of not using spaces between proper words, not the German practice of creating new, long words (nouns) from other words. Very different thing. And it's not just the greeks that didn't use spaces between words in sentences, just take a walk through Rome and read the old Latin inscriptions on old ruins. Long sentences, no spaces.
An interesting thing is that the "zombie", the name New Scientist used
for the non-conscious part of you that is actually moving your tennis
arm, walking the staircase, reaching for the glass of water and actually
driving your car -- this part of you is _not_ fooled by most of these
illusions. This has been shown by testing people with "blindsight", as
well as people with normal vision. Thus, it may be that such tricks
wouldn't work too well on the hockey field.
Read the article. The point is not to replace the hearth, it's to assist the heart. It was designed that way. Thus, the comment you replied to was entirely relevant.
These Nigerian scam guys may look like a joke to most of us, but they are dangerous criminals who would, in fact, kill you if you make trouble and they could get a hand on you. There have been several occasions already, for example a Norwegian businessman named Kjetil Moe in 1999. The guy was 65 years old and of the old school where he thought that any problems could be resolved by a face-to-face meeting. He actually travelled to South-Africa to meet these guys. He promptly went missing and was found killed later. The newspaper coverage was quite intensive at the time. Here's one link.
>True, but funding UML seems kind of curious. After all, if you can >virtualize, then theoretically you're going to be buying fewer of >those Intel processors. So, what are those bunny-suited Intellers up to?
Weeell.. in my group we just bought a new Intel PC.
We were going to anyway, but when we figured out we
could use it for running lots of UML guest hosts on
it for letting the developers get their own specific
test environments we decided to upgrade the order to
a huge hunky SMP Xeon machine. So, in this case UML
got Intel more money out of the deal.
I learned touch typing on a mechanical typewriter /etc/X11/XF86Config-4 keyboard driver setup.
and was completely fine with the capslock key there.
However, I've been programming for nearly three
decades by now, and I have never ever in all that
time had need of the caps lock key. It's just
unbelivable that computer keyboards still ship
with a key called 'Caps Lock', and that the default
XFree86 setup still includes caps lock.
Everybody, add 'Option "XkbOptions" "ctrl:nocaps"
to your
The mplayer I have doesn't use any windows codec,
it does however use a real plugin (for linux).
Doesn't seem native to me.
Great idea,but you should all add those scamsites
to your list of non-proxied and/or cached sites,
e.g. in your browser. Otherwise all your reloading
will just serve the images from your cache, instead
of from the actual fake bank sites.
You could also use shift-reload, but then you would
also load the artists-against-419 site as well.
Shame on whoever put that title ("Faster than DSL") on this
posting. This is much worse than comparing apples and oranges,
it's like saying "a ferrari is faster than a tarmac road".
DSL is a low-level protocol for utilizing the copper going to
your house, and nothing in BIC-TCP is going to increase that
speed.
BIC-TCP is a solution for the more and more common problem of
really high bandwidth (say, up to hundreds of megabits, or
gigabits per sec.), combined with relatively long round trip
times. Like e.g. having a fiber from one continent to another,
or high speed satellite links. With standard TCP/IP your
transmission rate will basically be limited to
2^window_size_in_bits/RTT_in_seconds
(see http://www.ieft.org/rfc/rfc1323.txt). Try some calculations
and you'll find that this sucks majorly. BIC-TCP is meant as
a way out of this problem. It won't make your copper go faster.
>No, in other words you would be better off like that. Not everyone has the same physique as you do, and just
>because you personally wouldn't find it useful doesn't mean nobody else will.
You don't get it. That was a guy with a "normal" physique AFAIK, and
he carried a backpack which contained the engine+power pack *only*.
(nothing there indicated that they had added any additional load), and
he *still* looked like he was carrying a heavy load! Did you see the
concentration on his face?
Ergo: With the current weight demands of the engine+power pack you're
better off without the whole exoskeleton. If you could use it at all
with any kind of leg disabilities isn't clear either.
>[developing]
Of course they will try to improve the device in the future.
That doesn't mean we won't comment on the current version..!
The video clearly showed that the power pack this device currently
needs is so heavy that a guy wearing the skeleton+power pack looks
the way I do when I carry 30+ kilos and no exoskeleton! In other words,
he would be much better off if he left the exoskeleton+power back
behind, and carried on using natural power only.
As with a lot of other cool devices, the really big problem is the need
for compact, efficient, lightweight power sources.
They currently don't exist.
Wow. I looked at MS' proposal as well as SPF's, and darn if MS didn't do much better.
First: SPF's webpage is mostly slogans about how it makes the world better, but you have to dig around a lot to find out how their scheme works. Mostly you'll just find more of the same self-hugging and no real technical info.
Secondly: MS' scheme seems simple enough, just one addition to DNS (list those mailservers allowed to send mails from your domain), and a very nice, standard-compliant way of handling the mobile-user problem:
If you're away from home and you're sending from your name12@somefreemail.com account, and you want your From: line to be your standard Me.Myself@my-own-domain.cx, whatever actual account you're sending through, then just make sure that your Sender: is name12@somefreemail.com and you're set. This is a nice alternative if you can't list your freemail ISP's mailserver in your DNS (maybe you don't know its IP address, or it's changing all the time).
Maybe SPF's scheme is similar, but they sure didn't mention any Sender: header there. Seemed to be some home-cooked up non-standard header, and a lot of talking about forwarding not working etc.
The only thing I didn't like with MS' scheme is the XML thing, why would you want to put XML in your DNS records? Nothing else in DNS is XML. Oh well.
You get fed up after a while, simple as that.
I used to get hooked on games too, but that is
many years past. Now past 40, I play the occasional
frozen bubble, and (even rarer) tuxracer. But there
are a lot of more interesting things to do out there
than gaming.
.. why come up with a new, fancy, feature-full mobile phone, and then blow it all just before the finish line by adding an external antenna? In 2004? Back in the bad, old days of 1997 you could only get phones with external antennas, and boy was it annoying when those darn things unstoppingly managed to dig a hole in your pocket or whatever you kept it in. The first phone company that came up with the internal antennas experienced a huge jump in market share, and I can't for the life of me understand why companies like Motorola are still making phones with ugly inconvinient external stickouts.
Come on, in the world outside of England, USA and Japan (and possibly oz), we all use 24 hour days! Although we could orally sometimes say "six in the afternoon", we write18! The day (argh, English doesn't even have a proper word for day+night, 24 hours!) is 24 hours, it's not 12 hours. And for most of the world you simply think in 24 hours. (My watch now shows 23:31, it's getting late)
I totally disagree. It takes me milliseconds to see and understand the numbers (the four first are usually bigger on digital wristwatches), i.e. instant snapshot of time. With analogue watches I have to scrutinize the display to figure out what time it is, it takes several seconds. And I may still get it wrong, it's happened that I've shown up an hour early because I mis-read that damn (borrowed) analogue watch.
Digital forever.