See another of my posts on this thread about the quality of the phones and the less-than-altruistic reasons therefor.
No, you paid per phone, but they didn't multiply that into your bill.
Read again, more carefully. I wrote about the base rate times the number of phones plus additional costs.
You failed to mention that long distance calls used to be based on how far you were calling, simply because you tied up more circuits the farther you called
Patently false. You have no idea how the system worked. A call followed the fastest route, even if it meant bouncing a call from D.C. to NYC through Atlanta, out to Denver, down to L.A., up to Spokane and back through Chicago; a call from D.C. to London could bounce once to Virginia, hit satellite or cable and be there in the U.K. with less than half the distance.
AT&T's rates were always based on what it cost them to complete the call, they weren't incredibly overpriced.
Again, false. The rates were set for maximised profit (in the economical sense). In 1980, a call from D.C. to France cost (iirc) $3.69 for the first three minutes and $1.12 each additional minute. Once the break-up came about, long distance dropped drastically and it was discovered that all throughout the hearings, AT&T had been lying about LD costs -- it turned out that LD was subsidising local calls, not the other way around. This is why all the Baby Bells drastically increased home phone rates. LD charges continued to drop due to competition and the removal of the local subsidy burden.
Have you heard of Bell Laboratories?
Yup, and that was my biggest concern in the break-up. Despite the problems, there was a lot of both pure and commercial research coming out of them. Still didn't change the fact that the Bell System held everyone hostage.
Cell phones for instance, were invented decades ago at AT&T
See http://wireless.ece.ufl.edu/~jshea/eel6509/misc/hi story.html. The government didn't prohibit AT&T from offering the services (it was Bell Mobile who handled mobile phones), it was the FCC and limited technology. AT&T went to ask for more bandwidth. The FCC asked them "how much bandwidth do you need?" AT&T muttered, "Umm... sixhundredsixtysix?"
True cellular (as opposed to standard radio) phones were invented by NTT and Siemens. A couple years later, the FCC relented and gavge them the bandwidth... in the microwave range. The technology was still being invented. Did you ever see the massive IMTS transcievers? The AMPS boxes? The first "handhelds"?
AT&T also had a great service record
The linemen were not out immediately to residential and government customers. They could take three weeks. Business phones were limited to those old, clunky PBX systems, no matter what neat options were possible. You don't have to go to Bell anymore for line service -- the local carrier is responsible for the wire to your primary entry point. You are responsible for your own internal wiring, and with that responsibility comes the freedom to arrange it as you please. Hire a contractor to do it.
I was a phreak in the late '70s and worked for C&P Bell in '83-'84. I was in the libraries and control rooms. I remember them putting down the masking tape in mid-December 1983 to demarcate the coming AT&T and Bell Atlantic sides, which would, within two years, no longer cohabit. I know from whence I speak.
It's easy to remember the good and hard to remember the bad. Bell Labs, but monopoly. Good quality phones, but no choice in which ones. One company billing you, but you paid whatever they said.
One of the best things about the break-up was that it finally put an end to Lily Tomlin doing her operator schtick on every variety show and dying sitcom. It was funny a few times, but at the time, it was oversaturation.
It's a "measure of power" only in the broadest sense. I'm gonna briefly get technical here and hope that you and maybe a couple other people notice this, since this story is more than 10 hours old.
One REN (Ringer Equivalence Number) represents a single ringer load of 7000 ohms (6929 Ohms resistance in series with 8F capacitance). U.S. (and most other) phones run at 48V (RMS) on-hook and 96V at ring.
Most phones ring at 20Hz and the REN carries the suffix 'A'; devices which ring at any (permitted) frequency have the suffix 'B'. The math gets complicated when you figure you're forcing 96VAC (RMS) down a few miles of occasionally looping copper, split out, to a device with leading and resistive components before a reactant load.
IIRC, most of Ma Bell's phones had 0.8A RENs. I don't have one here (nor any of the manuals -- I did say I was doing this from memory), so I can't check. But remember that you leased your phones from Ma Bell and they knew that the load you should have had. Generally, it was about 5600 Ohms times the number of phones. Even if you had paid for five phones, the difference in the load with an additional phone was notable.
Of course, in our house we only had "two phones", which we claimed we carried from room to room. We had a couple real old phones with much lower RENs (although we didn't know about the technical side until I became a phreak). Because my parents both worked back then in the 60s (not so common then), we were able to force Ma Bell's inspectors to visit Saturday. Friday night the rest of the phones disappeared into hiding places that even the LAPD with search warrants would have had a hard time finding.
Again, current RENs vary greatly, but back before 1984, there were standards. I was constantly hounded by my parents to disconnect my modem (300 baud acoustic) from the line when I wasn't using it.
Luckily, I got a job for a company that made, among other things, modems, and got a (then $3K+) 300/1200 jobber with an REN of 0.8 or so and which separated the phone pass-through from the circuit, allowing the modem to "replace" the basement phone.
Save that phone! Western Electric made phones that needed to last for 100 years, and their 100-year-old phones work fine. Why? Because they were never meant to be for sale to the public. They were for Ma Bell, who kept costs down by having indestructible equipment. The cheap POS equipment now is cheap because it can be.
The Bell System phones (all have a statement stamped in the metal stating "Prop. of Bell System, made by W.E." or something similar) have carbon mics for both mouth- and earpiece. Sound quality shot? Rap the handset against a table to compress the carbon again. The hardware inside is foolproof.
The rotary units don't need lubrication and are true beacons of design elegance and simplicity (they use an eccentric cam to control the pulse speed). The DTMF units used iron cores no chip to fry or die. Even the ringer is impressive.
If you don't want the thing, I'll buy it from you, and I don't care which model it is.
It wasn't homework for me -- it was straight from memory, right down to the number nine crossbars (which made phreaking easy). Only after they disappeared were the phone companies able to run things like unauthorised tone detectors.
Another sick side of the stifling of technology was number tracing. It became a hackneyed device for all mysteries and thrillers, but the real-life side of it really did cause a lot of headaches. Ma Bell claimed they couldn't internally check connections. The police would have to call to prepare for a trace on a known line and Bell would send some poor schlub into the pits to physically trace a number.
A really good lineman with a lot of luck on certain equipment might have been able to find the line in question and track its connection within four minutes, hence the ubiquitous three minute minimum trace times in both film and reality. A lot of kidnappers and other criminals could have been caught were it not for Bell's refusal to acknowledge that they had the means to to immediately identify a call's path.
It was "Ma Bell", not "ma bells" or "Baby Bells" (which were the resulting smaller phone service providers after the 1984 break-up) and the similarities are many.
Back in the bad old days (prior to Jan. 1, 1984), you could only get a phone from AT&T. They owned Western Electric, which was the only manufacturer of telephone equipment. They owned the lines (there were some exceptions where GTE had a local market). If you wanted a phone, you had to accept the whole package.
You had to lease your phones from them -- you couldn't buy them. You had to pay extra for DTMF (Touch-Tone [TM]). Your monthly bill was based on the base rate times the number of phones plus the base local call charge plus the incredibly overpriced long distance calls, which themselves worked on a minimum of three minutes and charges were rounded up to the next whole minute.
They stifled technology much more so than IBM, even when it hurt them. It became cheaper and easier for them to have customers using DTMF, but because people wanted it rather than the damned dialing wheels, they kept on charging premiums, which meant they had to keep those old number nine crossbars in the COs rather than (or in addition to) the electronic switches.
The whole idea of ringer equivalence existed so they could shoot a charge down your line and know how many phones you had. If it didn't match, they'd come over for a "technical visit". If they saw signs that you had more than the paid/claimed number of phones, they'd either hardwire the phone in the jack or remove other jacks. You had to let them; it was their equipment.
People used to huddle around a phone to listen and talk at the same time because Ma Bell wanted you to pay twice as much to have two people at home talk to a caller at the same time.
ISPs are trying this game, requiring you to use their hardware, accept their version of "normal use", and pay per computer rather than for the amount of data transfer so they can claim "unlimited" or "flat-rate service. It may be illegal based on the same decision which finally allowed people to buy their own phones, have as many as they wanted and use them as they saw fit.
This needs to be stopped quickly. Lawyers need to compare these laws to the Orders from Judge Harold Greene which stopped AT&T doing this, and have this bad legislation removed. You people in Michigan need to get started!
You're thinking of the Berne Convention [for the Protection of Literary and Artistic Works, as amended]. The Geneva Convention is the one that says the U.S. can't do what it's currently doing on Guantanamo.
Both are scraps of paper that any country can pretty much choose to ignore at any time. The U.S. both enforces and ignores these treaties as it sees fit, depending on the mood.
No. You file where YOU are, which is where the crime took place. A spam mesage may have bounced through servers in New Zeland, China, South Africa and Kazakhstan, but it ended up where you are. This is no different from buying a mail order widget that doesn't work. The company may be in East Nowhere, North Dakota, but if you're in Frostbite Falls, Minnesota, you sue them in the Frostbite Falls courts, and you have any advantages Frostbite Falls law might lend you. This doen't preclude you from suing in East Nowhere, but you need to show their violation under East Nowhere law, whereas in Frostbite Falls, the widget didn't work.
Example: Don't sue corporations in Delaware; Delaware sells itself as corporation-friendly. Their laws are set up to make incorporation easy and make all things nice for corporations. Just have a look-see at the Central Delaware Chamber of Commerce site before you disagree. I set up two corporations in DE myself.
"If I find a coding error or vulnerability in a Microsoft Shared Source program, can I fix it and recompile?
"Can I provide this fix to others? If not, why not?"
I'd recommend losing the bit about the Borg on that site unless it's a page meant only for geeks and techies -- name-calling cheapens the rest of your arguments. It doesn't matter that they started it. </FourthGradeTeacher>
Just point out the uselessness of Shared Source and the piles of responses to Microsoft FUD.
A Chicago to New York maglev is an insteresting proposition. That 750 miles equates to 1200km, and at the discount price of only $19 million per kilometer (half of the "projected" cost in Germany), amounts to $28 trillion. That's just for laying the track and doesn't take into account any rights of way, easements, additional bridge work (at around $50 million per for widening and strengthening), tunneling or bridges for all car crossings, etc. We can get to Mars for a lot less.
The traffic isn't there to even set up a simple air shuttle service, such as the Delta and USAir DC-NYC-BOS services which already exist. Hell, "regular" NYC-Chicago train service is either the 20-hour 6:35a.m.-2:25a.m. Pennsylvanian or the 17.5-hour 1:45 p.m.-9:08a.m. Three Rivers -- and both of them require a connection in Philly. While an NYC-ORD flight on USAir might require a stop in Philly, you'll be there in less than 17 hours.
Two hours to get through security in an airport is a bit steep unless you're playing the funny guy and making stupid jokes. When I got pulled out of line for an "interview" with some FBI guys, I still made it through in about an hour.
You also ignore the fact that you have to get to a train station, which, admittedly, is generally faster than getting to an airport. Unless you live in the suburbs. When I visit DC, it takes me 40 minutes to get between the house and Union Station; it takes me 20-30 minutes to get to National or Dulles.
Don't get me wrong: I like the maglev idea, but right now, it makes no sense economically or practically.
Please explain how a train with a theoretical maximum standard speed of 500km/h is faster than a plane which cruises at 1000km/h.
For small hops, especially because of travel to and from airports, check-in time, slotting, etc., the train can be faster, but once the distance exceeds about 400km (around 250 miles), the plane starts winning all races.
Amtrak takes three days to cross the North American continent; Delta, six hours. I'm flying from Munich to London Wednesday: two hours, three including intermediary travel. My Sunday return is 28 1/2 hours on four or five trains, plus a subway and a walking connection, and it requires an overnight stop in Paris.
It makes things worse because along with delays and the resulting schedule changes, we have no idea when the train we want is coming. Public transportation (regular and express trains, S-Bahns, subways, streetcars and buses) generally run on or very close to schedule.
If the S-8 is the dead line then I've got at least a 30-minute wait for the next one. I could take an alternative route by U-Bahn and bus and be at work (or home) quicker if the big board in Karlsplatz wasn't showing a GPF window or BSOD dump.
Linux advocacy? Not a chance. There's no way to contact the MVV/MVG (public transport operating companies). Furthermore, they paid big bucks (OK, Deutschmarks) for the Win32 program and aren't about to pay for it all over again on another OS. Even if they were willing, they'd be hard-pressed to explain why they were doing so and why they went with the crappy Win program to begin with.
Yes, they made a mistake, and in an ideal world, they'd admit it. But bureaucracies are not part of an ideal world. The person who admits to doing it wrong -- or who points out his boss or department did it wrong -- has all the job security of a blind photographer.
Here in Munich, we dodged a bullet as the Transrapid idea from the airport to city center was killed. The current S-Bahns can be sped up to 160km/h (from a current 80-120, generally), which would take the travel time down to 16 minutes versus the expected 10 for the Transrapid. This requires no more land, no additional building disruptions (lots of construction and really bad traffic here in Munich), and, even more importantly, the S-Bahn can do the job for half the cost and one-fifth the energy.
The Transrapid would've cost us about $38 million per kilometer and additional annual costs of $215K. For comparison, ICE train tracks (Inter-City Europe express tracks) cost $16.5 million per km and around $165K annually.
It gets worse. There's a 30km test track in Emden, and the train has never been up to it's supposed max speed of 500 km/h. The distance from the Munich airport to the city center is only about 20km, and the thing needs 5km just to get up to 300 km/h. Planned costs were set at $1.6 billion (with a "B" as in, "bwooaaaahhh!") -- expected costs around 50% more. Planned completion was 2006 and expected 2008-2010.
Munich dodged a bullet, but now faces over a year of public transport hell as the main through-tunnel for all S-Bahns is upgraded to increase capacity from 20 to 30 trains an hour. (All S-Bahn trains pass through this tunnel, resulting in massive delays whenever there's a problem even near the tunnel, which extends some seven stations, 5 in the tunnel and end points.) To make things worse, the video schedule displays along the lines run Windows and crash at least once a week. Luckily, the trains don't.
486 or P75? Sure. Mail server. Firewall. File server. News server. Burner. CD library.
Hell, a P75 works fine as a Windows NT4 PDC for a small network and can also handle low-to-medium file serving for around 20 users at the same time.
Then there's the idea of using Linux network client stations, as in "How to create a Linux-based network of computers for peanuts", to which this site linked more than a year ago. This system can even make use of 386s -- I've already tried it. True, performance is a bit slack, but just how much power do you really need to write documents? A network-based 386 (or one running Slack 2.x) with Abiword or maybe pico/vi/emacs (some people do actually like those) works just fine.
woof.
About this concept car
on
239 MPG Car
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
It was more a marketing gimmick than anything else. They worked hard to get that car legal for the road and highway in Germany. I'm kind of surprised they didn't have it following closely behind a semi (lorry) to slipstream and get that mileage down even further.
There's a small article about it here, and the Sueddeutsche Zeitung has both this picture and this article (with more pictures). The car ran on diesel (not any alternative fuel) at an average speed of 75km/h, or about 46mph. Some sections of Autobahn have a minimum speed of 80km/h (50mph).
This was a concept car which isn't much more than a motorcycle on three wheels with a cockpit rather than a fairing. However, VW is a big name in fuel efficiency. The Lupo, a production car, needs less than 5l/100km, or close to 50mpg, and that with a top speed of 199km/h or about 120mph. In Europe, with fuel about three times the cost of the US (for many reasons including taxes and ecological concerns), this is important.
Bio-diesel is gaining acceptance and outlets in Germany, as is LNG (liquid natural gas), but this car wasn't using them. DaimlerChrysler is still working on hydrogen power, a much more sensible fuel.
Is it really "News" in December when this car ran in April?
Support for multiprocessor machines, heterogeneous networks, LAN, and WAN
Support for scheduling of virtual processes or explicit distribution to available processors
Support for virtual shared memory
Support for synchronization, locking, and latency hiding
It looks like they took a few pages from the various distributed projects (United Devices, distributed.net). I can see this being used for universities and some research and scientific institutions, but still, with processor power today, even Mathematica representations of 10-dimensional Calabi-Yau spaces can be rendered in minutes.
I used to live in NY and I like this law, but parts of it will definitely change.
Telemarketers who violate the law are subject to a fine of up to $5,000 per call.
BUT...
In order to comply with the law and maintain accurate internal call lists... The Registry... is available for a fee of $800.00 per telemarketer per calendar year
This won't stand up; "Restraint of Trade" comes to mind. Either the list must be made free to telemarketers because it is a law with selective application (no calls only to those on the list) which they must follow, or the fines will be dropped on appeal. You cannot force a company to pay for information it needs to keep itself legal every quarter. Think of the ramifications: if this is acceptable, then why not another law which requires companies to downlaod a list of people on welfare which every company must download for $500/month so that they can report if someone on Welfare is actually working for them? You must take the idea to the extreme when considering it because, come hell or high water, sooner or later some case will test an extreme beyond whatever popped into your noggin before.
I'm not against charging the telemarketers. I'm against badly written laws which give the telemarketers a way to weasel out in court and which have chilling potential future effects.
woof.
Truth is stranger than fiction because fiction has to make sense.
Back only twenty years ago, serious programming was more often done on leased, timed connections and computations were batched. Boeing was not thrilled that I was able to do a lot of the dirty work at home for comparatively nothing once there was a COBOL package for the Atari 800.
Now, some software firms, primarily under the banner of "fighting piracy" are looking again to the pay-to-play model and trying to implement this sort of system, most notably in the.NET framework. While the initial outlay for users may be much smaller (since software packages don't need to be purchased in bulk up-front), the long-term strategy is to bring in more money to the software creator.
However, personal computers are too powerful and there are too many people interested in having software which works locally -- obtained by paying a one-time fee or nothing at all -- that it would be difficult, if not impossible, to force people and companies back into the old model.
The Internet is another matter. Computer systems used to run exclusively locally. Thanks to the work by you and your peers, where it used to be near-impossible to hook up a couple VAXes together, it became possible to link more and more computers together into the Net we have today.
Political and corporate forces are attempting to divide and control this behemoth. While the first round of attempts in the form of the dot-bomb craze failed spectacularly in commercialising and segmenting the Net, a new wave is having much more success. The Great Firewall of China and damnable legislation is cutting access. Further attempts to force hardware manufacturers to make controls available continue.
Unlike software, which has been commoditised, carrier and connection are services which cross state and national borders. Furthermore, where there are few barriers to entry in the software field, a common carrier requires incredible up-front infrastructure. Hence, there are few major carriers, all of which are regulated by both domestic and foreign governments.
It is therefore rather unlikely, even with some clever hacks such as Triangle Boy, that a return to closed loops and segments is unavoidable if the proponents are prepared to work at it, which they seemingly are.
What do you think about these developments? If your feeling is that they are anathema to the purpose of the Net (which was initially a defensive weapon and never meant to be what it has become), do you see any solutions beyond lobbying of Congressmen, which won't happen for the simple reason that the users are too dispersed as compared to those organised and deep-pocketed who would strongly control the Net?
Erastothenes had measured how far around the planet was. Cavendish had weighed it: 6.0 x 1024 kilograms...
6144kg? So the weights Cavendish used were almost 5% of the planet's mass.
Now either the Earth's been packing on the pounds over the last 200 years like a pregnant 30-year-old Polynesian, or the Times has some serious problem with HTML formatting.
Beano is the magic pill. Alpha-galactose. True, it's an enzyme, not a protein, but a protein isn't going to stop farts, which are mainly caused by sugars we can't digest but which the bugs in our intestines can.
Truly, this was one of the best reviews I have ever read. I laughed. I cried. I did other stuff.
Note to/. readers: If you're not browsing at -1, see the parent to this post for a fine example of a great comment and bad moderation.
Woe unto the he who nailed this review as flamebait, for I will metamod aggressively! Unless it was Taco, which means I will never metamod ever again. Not by choice, you understand. Well, not my choice, anyway.
woof.
It's been more than a dozen years. Mel Brooks ought to have that Spaceballs sequel ready any day now.
No, it's much better than Shatner. Anything's better than Shatner.
You've obviously never heard Leonard Nimoy singing "If I Had a Hammer".
woof.
The picture on the album should've warned me: Nimoy dressed up as a flower child -- something so surreal Roddenbury had him dress like that again in an ST episode.
Slashdot Mirror
No, you paid per phone, but they didn't multiply that into your bill.
Read again, more carefully. I wrote about the base rate times the number of phones plus additional costs.
You failed to mention that long distance calls used to be based on how far you were calling, simply because you tied up more circuits the farther you called
Patently false. You have no idea how the system worked. A call followed the fastest route, even if it meant bouncing a call from D.C. to NYC through Atlanta, out to Denver, down to L.A., up to Spokane and back through Chicago; a call from D.C. to London could bounce once to Virginia, hit satellite or cable and be there in the U.K. with less than half the distance.
AT&T's rates were always based on what it cost them to complete the call, they weren't incredibly overpriced.
Again, false. The rates were set for maximised profit (in the economical sense). In 1980, a call from D.C. to France cost (iirc) $3.69 for the first three minutes and $1.12 each additional minute. Once the break-up came about, long distance dropped drastically and it was discovered that all throughout the hearings, AT&T had been lying about LD costs -- it turned out that LD was subsidising local calls, not the other way around. This is why all the Baby Bells drastically increased home phone rates. LD charges continued to drop due to competition and the removal of the local subsidy burden.
Have you heard of Bell Laboratories?
Yup, and that was my biggest concern in the break-up. Despite the problems, there was a lot of both pure and commercial research coming out of them. Still didn't change the fact that the Bell System held everyone hostage.
Cell phones for instance, were invented decades ago at AT&T
See http://wireless.ece.ufl.edu/~jshea/eel6509/misc/hi story.html. The government didn't prohibit AT&T from offering the services (it was Bell Mobile who handled mobile phones), it was the FCC and limited technology. AT&T went to ask for more bandwidth. The FCC asked them "how much bandwidth do you need?" AT&T muttered, "Umm... sixhundredsixtysix?"
True cellular (as opposed to standard radio) phones were invented by NTT and Siemens. A couple years later, the FCC relented and gavge them the bandwidth... in the microwave range. The technology was still being invented. Did you ever see the massive IMTS transcievers? The AMPS boxes? The first "handhelds"?
AT&T also had a great service record
The linemen were not out immediately to residential and government customers. They could take three weeks. Business phones were limited to those old, clunky PBX systems, no matter what neat options were possible. You don't have to go to Bell anymore for line service -- the local carrier is responsible for the wire to your primary entry point. You are responsible for your own internal wiring, and with that responsibility comes the freedom to arrange it as you please. Hire a contractor to do it.
I was a phreak in the late '70s and worked for C&P Bell in '83-'84. I was in the libraries and control rooms. I remember them putting down the masking tape in mid-December 1983 to demarcate the coming AT&T and Bell Atlantic sides, which would, within two years, no longer cohabit. I know from whence I speak.
It's easy to remember the good and hard to remember the bad. Bell Labs, but monopoly. Good quality phones, but no choice in which ones. One company billing you, but you paid whatever they said.
One of the best things about the break-up was that it finally put an end to Lily Tomlin doing her operator schtick on every variety show and dying sitcom. It was funny a few times, but at the time, it was oversaturation.
One REN (Ringer Equivalence Number) represents a single ringer load of 7000 ohms (6929 Ohms resistance in series with 8F capacitance). U.S. (and most other) phones run at 48V (RMS) on-hook and 96V at ring.
Most phones ring at 20Hz and the REN carries the suffix 'A'; devices which ring at any (permitted) frequency have the suffix 'B'. The math gets complicated when you figure you're forcing 96VAC (RMS) down a few miles of occasionally looping copper, split out, to a device with leading and resistive components before a reactant load.
IIRC, most of Ma Bell's phones had 0.8A RENs. I don't have one here (nor any of the manuals -- I did say I was doing this from memory), so I can't check. But remember that you leased your phones from Ma Bell and they knew that the load you should have had. Generally, it was about 5600 Ohms times the number of phones. Even if you had paid for five phones, the difference in the load with an additional phone was notable.
Of course, in our house we only had "two phones", which we claimed we carried from room to room. We had a couple real old phones with much lower RENs (although we didn't know about the technical side until I became a phreak). Because my parents both worked back then in the 60s (not so common then), we were able to force Ma Bell's inspectors to visit Saturday. Friday night the rest of the phones disappeared into hiding places that even the LAPD with search warrants would have had a hard time finding.
Again, current RENs vary greatly, but back before 1984, there were standards. I was constantly hounded by my parents to disconnect my modem (300 baud acoustic) from the line when I wasn't using it.
Luckily, I got a job for a company that made, among other things, modems, and got a (then $3K+) 300/1200 jobber with an REN of 0.8 or so and which separated the phone pass-through from the circuit, allowing the modem to "replace" the basement phone.
I spent hours explaining that one to my father.
The Bell System phones (all have a statement stamped in the metal stating "Prop. of Bell System, made by W.E." or something similar) have carbon mics for both mouth- and earpiece. Sound quality shot? Rap the handset against a table to compress the carbon again. The hardware inside is foolproof.
The rotary units don't need lubrication and are true beacons of design elegance and simplicity (they use an eccentric cam to control the pulse speed). The DTMF units used iron cores no chip to fry or die. Even the ringer is impressive.
If you don't want the thing, I'll buy it from you, and I don't care which model it is.
Another sick side of the stifling of technology was number tracing. It became a hackneyed device for all mysteries and thrillers, but the real-life side of it really did cause a lot of headaches. Ma Bell claimed they couldn't internally check connections. The police would have to call to prepare for a trace on a known line and Bell would send some poor schlub into the pits to physically trace a number.
A really good lineman with a lot of luck on certain equipment might have been able to find the line in question and track its connection within four minutes, hence the ubiquitous three minute minimum trace times in both film and reality. A lot of kidnappers and other criminals could have been caught were it not for Bell's refusal to acknowledge that they had the means to to immediately identify a call's path.
I forgot the obligatory link before: Bell System Property - Not For Sale". Surf around that site for lots of other information and neat stuff.
I haven't been able to find the Orders and Decrees from the actual case, but I'm pretty sure they're on-line somewhere.
woof.
Back in the bad old days (prior to Jan. 1, 1984), you could only get a phone from AT&T. They owned Western Electric, which was the only manufacturer of telephone equipment. They owned the lines (there were some exceptions where GTE had a local market). If you wanted a phone, you had to accept the whole package.
You had to lease your phones from them -- you couldn't buy them. You had to pay extra for DTMF (Touch-Tone [TM]). Your monthly bill was based on the base rate times the number of phones plus the base local call charge plus the incredibly overpriced long distance calls, which themselves worked on a minimum of three minutes and charges were rounded up to the next whole minute.
They stifled technology much more so than IBM, even when it hurt them. It became cheaper and easier for them to have customers using DTMF, but because people wanted it rather than the damned dialing wheels, they kept on charging premiums, which meant they had to keep those old number nine crossbars in the COs rather than (or in addition to) the electronic switches.
The whole idea of ringer equivalence existed so they could shoot a charge down your line and know how many phones you had. If it didn't match, they'd come over for a "technical visit". If they saw signs that you had more than the paid/claimed number of phones, they'd either hardwire the phone in the jack or remove other jacks. You had to let them; it was their equipment.
People used to huddle around a phone to listen and talk at the same time because Ma Bell wanted you to pay twice as much to have two people at home talk to a caller at the same time.
ISPs are trying this game, requiring you to use their hardware, accept their version of "normal use", and pay per computer rather than for the amount of data transfer so they can claim "unlimited" or "flat-rate service. It may be illegal based on the same decision which finally allowed people to buy their own phones, have as many as they wanted and use them as they saw fit.
This needs to be stopped quickly. Lawyers need to compare these laws to the Orders from Judge Harold Greene which stopped AT&T doing this, and have this bad legislation removed. You people in Michigan need to get started!
woof.
Both are scraps of paper that any country can pretty much choose to ignore at any time. The U.S. both enforces and ignores these treaties as it sees fit, depending on the mood.
Example: Don't sue corporations in Delaware; Delaware sells itself as corporation-friendly. Their laws are set up to make incorporation easy and make all things nice for corporations. Just have a look-see at the Central Delaware Chamber of Commerce site before you disagree. I set up two corporations in DE myself.
"Can I provide this fix to others? If not, why not?"
I'd recommend losing the bit about the Borg on that site unless it's a page meant only for geeks and techies -- name-calling cheapens the rest of your arguments. It doesn't matter that they started it. </FourthGradeTeacher>
Just point out the uselessness of Shared Source and the piles of responses to Microsoft FUD.
woof.
The traffic isn't there to even set up a simple air shuttle service, such as the Delta and USAir DC-NYC-BOS services which already exist. Hell, "regular" NYC-Chicago train service is either the 20-hour 6:35a.m.-2:25a.m. Pennsylvanian or the 17.5-hour 1:45 p.m.-9:08a.m. Three Rivers -- and both of them require a connection in Philly. While an NYC-ORD flight on USAir might require a stop in Philly, you'll be there in less than 17 hours.
Two hours to get through security in an airport is a bit steep unless you're playing the funny guy and making stupid jokes. When I got pulled out of line for an "interview" with some FBI guys, I still made it through in about an hour.
You also ignore the fact that you have to get to a train station, which, admittedly, is generally faster than getting to an airport. Unless you live in the suburbs. When I visit DC, it takes me 40 minutes to get between the house and Union Station; it takes me 20-30 minutes to get to National or Dulles.
Don't get me wrong: I like the maglev idea, but right now, it makes no sense economically or practically.
woof.
Please explain how a train with a theoretical maximum standard speed of 500km/h is faster than a plane which cruises at 1000km/h.
For small hops, especially because of travel to and from airports, check-in time, slotting, etc., the train can be faster, but once the distance exceeds about 400km (around 250 miles), the plane starts winning all races.
Amtrak takes three days to cross the North American continent; Delta, six hours. I'm flying from Munich to London Wednesday: two hours, three including intermediary travel. My Sunday return is 28 1/2 hours on four or five trains, plus a subway and a walking connection, and it requires an overnight stop in Paris.
woof.
If the S-8 is the dead line then I've got at least a 30-minute wait for the next one. I could take an alternative route by U-Bahn and bus and be at work (or home) quicker if the big board in Karlsplatz wasn't showing a GPF window or BSOD dump.
Linux advocacy? Not a chance. There's no way to contact the MVV/MVG (public transport operating companies). Furthermore, they paid big bucks (OK, Deutschmarks) for the Win32 program and aren't about to pay for it all over again on another OS. Even if they were willing, they'd be hard-pressed to explain why they were doing so and why they went with the crappy Win program to begin with.
Yes, they made a mistake, and in an ideal world, they'd admit it. But bureaucracies are not part of an ideal world. The person who admits to doing it wrong -- or who points out his boss or department did it wrong -- has all the job security of a blind photographer.
woof.
The Transrapid would've cost us about $38 million per kilometer and additional annual costs of $215K. For comparison, ICE train tracks (Inter-City Europe express tracks) cost $16.5 million per km and around $165K annually.
It gets worse. There's a 30km test track in Emden, and the train has never been up to it's supposed max speed of 500 km/h. The distance from the Munich airport to the city center is only about 20km, and the thing needs 5km just to get up to 300 km/h. Planned costs were set at $1.6 billion (with a "B" as in, "bwooaaaahhh!") -- expected costs around 50% more. Planned completion was 2006 and expected 2008-2010.
Munich dodged a bullet, but now faces over a year of public transport hell as the main through-tunnel for all S-Bahns is upgraded to increase capacity from 20 to 30 trains an hour. (All S-Bahn trains pass through this tunnel, resulting in massive delays whenever there's a problem even near the tunnel, which extends some seven stations, 5 in the tunnel and end points.) To make things worse, the video schedule displays along the lines run Windows and crash at least once a week. Luckily, the trains don't.
woof.
Hell, a P75 works fine as a Windows NT4 PDC for a small network and can also handle low-to-medium file serving for around 20 users at the same time.
Then there's the idea of using Linux network client stations, as in "How to create a Linux-based network of computers for peanuts", to which this site linked more than a year ago. This system can even make use of 386s -- I've already tried it. True, performance is a bit slack, but just how much power do you really need to write documents? A network-based 386 (or one running Slack 2.x) with Abiword or maybe pico/vi/emacs (some people do actually like those) works just fine.
woof.
There's a small article about it here, and the Sueddeutsche Zeitung has both this picture and this article (with more pictures). The car ran on diesel (not any alternative fuel) at an average speed of 75km/h, or about 46mph. Some sections of Autobahn have a minimum speed of 80km/h (50mph).
This was a concept car which isn't much more than a motorcycle on three wheels with a cockpit rather than a fairing. However, VW is a big name in fuel efficiency. The Lupo, a production car, needs less than 5l/100km, or close to 50mpg, and that with a top speed of 199km/h or about 120mph. In Europe, with fuel about three times the cost of the US (for many reasons including taxes and ecological concerns), this is important.
Bio-diesel is gaining acceptance and outlets in Germany, as is LNG (liquid natural gas), but this car wasn't using them. DaimlerChrysler is still working on hydrogen power, a much more sensible fuel.
Is it really "News" in December when this car ran in April?
woof.
- Windows 95/98/Me/NT/2000/XP
- Mac OS X
- Mac OS 8.1 or later
- Linux (Redhat 7.1 or equivalent) or later
- PowerPC Linux (Yellow Dog 2.1 equivalent or later)
- AlphaLinux (Redhat 6.2 or equivalent) or later
- Solaris 8 or later
- Compaq Tru64 Unix 5.1 or later
- HP-RISC HP-UX 11.00 or later
- IBM RS/6000 AIX 5.1 or later
- SGI IRIX 6.2 or later
If the call is for "Redhat 7.1 or equivalent", I can't think of any reason that a distro with kernel 2.4.2 or later wouldn't work.woof.
- Support for multiprocessor machines, heterogeneous networks, LAN, and WAN
- Support for scheduling of virtual processes or explicit distribution to available processors
- Support for virtual shared memory
- Support for synchronization, locking, and latency hiding
It looks like they took a few pages from the various distributed projects (United Devices, distributed.net). I can see this being used for universities and some research and scientific institutions, but still, with processor power today, even Mathematica representations of 10-dimensional Calabi-Yau spaces can be rendered in minutes.woof.
<duck>
woof.
Telemarketers who violate the law are subject to a fine of up to $5,000 per call.
BUT...
In order to comply with the law and maintain accurate internal call lists... The Registry ... is available for a fee of $800.00 per telemarketer per calendar year
This won't stand up; "Restraint of Trade" comes to mind. Either the list must be made free to telemarketers because it is a law with selective application (no calls only to those on the list) which they must follow, or the fines will be dropped on appeal. You cannot force a company to pay for information it needs to keep itself legal every quarter. Think of the ramifications: if this is acceptable, then why not another law which requires companies to downlaod a list of people on welfare which every company must download for $500/month so that they can report if someone on Welfare is actually working for them? You must take the idea to the extreme when considering it because, come hell or high water, sooner or later some case will test an extreme beyond whatever popped into your noggin before.
I'm not against charging the telemarketers. I'm against badly written laws which give the telemarketers a way to weasel out in court and which have chilling potential future effects.
woof.
Truth is stranger than fiction because fiction has to make sense.
Now, some software firms, primarily under the banner of "fighting piracy" are looking again to the pay-to-play model and trying to implement this sort of system, most notably in the .NET framework. While the initial outlay for users may be much smaller (since software packages don't need to be purchased in bulk up-front), the long-term strategy is to bring in more money to the software creator.
However, personal computers are too powerful and there are too many people interested in having software which works locally -- obtained by paying a one-time fee or nothing at all -- that it would be difficult, if not impossible, to force people and companies back into the old model.
The Internet is another matter. Computer systems used to run exclusively locally. Thanks to the work by you and your peers, where it used to be near-impossible to hook up a couple VAXes together, it became possible to link more and more computers together into the Net we have today.
Political and corporate forces are attempting to divide and control this behemoth. While the first round of attempts in the form of the dot-bomb craze failed spectacularly in commercialising and segmenting the Net, a new wave is having much more success. The Great Firewall of China and damnable legislation is cutting access. Further attempts to force hardware manufacturers to make controls available continue.
Unlike software, which has been commoditised, carrier and connection are services which cross state and national borders. Furthermore, where there are few barriers to entry in the software field, a common carrier requires incredible up-front infrastructure. Hence, there are few major carriers, all of which are regulated by both domestic and foreign governments.
It is therefore rather unlikely, even with some clever hacks such as Triangle Boy, that a return to closed loops and segments is unavoidable if the proponents are prepared to work at it, which they seemingly are.
What do you think about these developments? If your feeling is that they are anathema to the purpose of the Net (which was initially a defensive weapon and never meant to be what it has become), do you see any solutions beyond lobbying of Congressmen, which won't happen for the simple reason that the users are too dispersed as compared to those organised and deep-pocketed who would strongly control the Net?
woof.
Now either the Earth's been packing on the pounds over the last 200 years like a pregnant 30-year-old Polynesian, or the Times has some serious problem with HTML formatting.
woof.
woof.
[*] Please, no lame religious jokes.
Beano is the magic pill. Alpha-galactose. True, it's an enzyme, not a protein, but a protein isn't going to stop farts, which are mainly caused by sugars we can't digest but which the bugs in our intestines can.
woof.
Truly, this was one of the best reviews I have ever read. I laughed. I cried. I did other stuff.
Note to /. readers: If you're not browsing at -1, see the parent to this post for a fine example of a great comment and bad moderation.
Woe unto the he who nailed this review as flamebait, for I will metamod aggressively! Unless it was Taco, which means I will never metamod ever again. Not by choice, you understand. Well, not my choice, anyway.
woof.
It's been more than a dozen years. Mel Brooks ought to have that Spaceballs sequel ready any day now.
You're obviously not on an H1B visa.
See also:h tml
http://www.iowa2010.state.ia.us/news/06_11.html
http://www.rediff.com/news/2001/may/24us1.htm
http://www.zazona.com/ShameH1B/H1BFAQs.htm
http://lists.tamil.com/lists/it/2001-01/msg00029.
woof.
You've obviously never heard Leonard Nimoy singing "If I Had a Hammer".
woof.
The picture on the album should've warned me: Nimoy dressed up as a flower child -- something so surreal Roddenbury had him dress like that again in an ST episode.