In practise the coverage is pretty good in the US now.
In the UK it was very frustrating because if you signed up with one network, your phone wouldn't automatically start roaming until you left the country. If you were in an area where T-Mobile didn't have service then you were SOL, even if Orange and Vodaphone had excellent coverage there.
In the US I can roam onto dozens of different GSM networks and still get the minutes and data included in my original plan. T-Mobile's coverage sucks in the areas of Kansas that my wife's family live, but i end up some unknown network called USA 590.
And FWIW using your logic I do "pay double" for my internet connection. When someone emails or IMs me then it uses the bandwidth that I've paid for. I don't get some free extra bandwidth to cover people calling me.
Are there other countries in the world where local landline calls are free? I remember growing up in Scotland I was very envious of the fact that people could dial onto the internet and stay connected day and night because it didn't cost them a penny.
Many people here don't even carry long distance service on their landlines. There is no way they can pay per minute for any call that they make. So either the cellphone companies had to (1) create cellphones that a segment of the population can't call or (2) make them work the same way as land lines and have the cell subscriber bear the cost.
We don't really pay twice. The person *placing* the call doesn't pay a penny, it's completely free if they are in your local area (and most of the population of my state is in mine).
The only situations where a person pays to call me is if they are on another cellphone network or if they are out of state (or country). So in my case, about half my calls aren't paid for at all and of the remainder about 90% are only paid for once (although i have to pay for all of those).
I think this made a lot more sense back when cell calls were really expensive. In Britain it still costs 13p/min to call a cellphone, back in the day it was sometimes as high as 30 or 40p (US 60-80c). This meant that if I chose to only have a cellphone then my friends would have to either not call me or choose to subsidize my serivce. If I had been in the US at the time then i'd have carried the full cost of my cellphone service.
The plan you quoted only seems to have one phone not the two that we have.
Granted finland seems to pretty much lead the world in cell services. It's been 8 or 9 years since i've been there, but at that time they had better coverage and similar technology to what the US does now.
In the US, merchants are amazingly sloppy about checking a signature match.
I've routinely signed my signature on my wife's card at checkouts and on pizza orders and despite the fact that I'm obviously not a Sarah and our signatures are very different it has never been questioned.
At least in europe they actually examine the match and will require further identification if they aren't satisfied that it's a consistent signature.
In the UK I couldn't get service nearly that cheap.
Granted it would be nice if the US would let you just buy airtime from the cheapest bidder, but the current packaging system works out well for me.
Also I consider the fact that I pay for incoming calls to be a HUGE bonus. In the UK you pretty much need a landline to take business calls, new customers are much less likely to make a call that costs them 10x what a local call would. In the US it's virtually impossible for someone to tell whether you gave them a cellphone or a landline.
I'm interested to know if you really can beat this package and annual spend
* 2 lines * 700 shared peak any-network minutes per month * unlimited minutes to subscribers on the same network * unlimited nights/weekend minutes * Nokia 3166 * T-Mobile Dash (Actually an HTC Excalibur, Feel free to substitute any Windows Smartphone with Built in Wifi & Bluetooth) * Unlimited GPRS/Edge Data * Unlimited Access to T-Mobile Hotspot Network (worth US$20/mo)
Total annaul spend of about $1180 (including the phones). We're also in the fortuitous situation where virtually every single family member and work collegue that we call on a regular basis is also a T-Mobile subscriber - as a result we regularly use 1000 free minutes in addition to maybe 500 of our plan mintutes.
I'm not saying you can't beat that in another country, but i'd be surprised if you could do siginificantly better
Most of europe had gone to an all digital network in the early 90s - I believe you can still find areas of the US that still only have analog service. Nationwide 3G is still a pipe dream.
The US services do seem considerably cheaper. We pay about US $90/mo for two lines, 1000 "any-network" minutes, free calls to other T-Mo subscribers, unlimited edge data, unlimited hotspot access and subsidizied phones. Each of our phone numbers is also a local number which is free for any local landline to call.
When i last lived in the UK the per-minute costs were stifiling (particularly to other cell networks) and data was pretty expensive too.
It's certainly not as friendly as europe, but things are definitely changing for the better in Colorado.
I technically live in an ex-burb (cringe) and they haven't finished building all the paths, but there are a few places I can get to mostly on bike trails, and within a few years we'll be connected to one of the main trail networks so i'll be able to travel to locations around 15 miles away rarely crossing any roads. A fair number of the new roads have bike lanes.
I can think of a few pedestrian bridges over major roads and a few more underpasses and there are pedestrian crossings at *most* intersections including all those in built up areas.
I can even walk from my office to my wife's office faster than i can drive (at least I can when there isn't several feet of snow on the ground).
On the other hand, I spent a night stranded in Dallas and probably spent 45 minutes trying to walk from my hotel to a shopping mall that I could see. In the end i gave up and had dinner delivered.
If you are a US Citizen then surely you can't be considered an enemy of the state until you've actually been CONVICTED of doing something wrong. Otherwise what would stop the president from declaring that "thule (9041)" is an enemy combatant and suspending your right to a fair trial.
If someone really is plotting terrorist activities on US soil then surely regular laws will be able to imprison them, try them and convict them without having to infringe on everyone elses rights.
There are rarely Wireless ISPs (excluding satelite) in areas which are well serviced by Cable.
I'm presumably in the minority since I have Wireless, Cable and (several) DSL options here. The wireless turns out to be the most expensive, slowest download and fastest upload of the bunch. I like them because they are local and have competent tech support, but i doubt they are a serious threat to the big guys:(
Games are a very different animal. DRM isn't what stops me playing PS3 games on my laptop, or loading Wii games onto my iPod so it's a much more mute point. There's really no business case for dropping it.
For the most part, there's nothing for movies to interoperate with and CSS is so lame that it can hardly be considered DRM. Even with years of easily copied digital product, the Movie industry is doing just fine. It wouldn't make one iota of difference if they dropped CSS now.
I've never really bought from supermarkets but I can imagine that they don't get organic deliveries as frequently. We're lucky to have three (and soon four) competing organic supermarket chains in this area - now target and even walmart (on occassion) carry organic produce. Competition really drives down prices - i can now get a dozen organic cage free eggs for only 20c more than the grade A battery farmed ones.
They tend to only deliver stuff that's in-season, but the quality is fantastic and it's opening my eyes to more vegetables that i'd never normally buy.
I'd forgotten how fruit and vegetables were supposed to taste. The majority of the conventionally farmed stuff at the supermarkets here is decidedly mediocre, but organic food is worth it on taste alone - i eat so much more fruit now that it tastes like it's supposed to!
The first of my friends to try installing linux didn't realize the particular distribution came with FTP installed with an anonymous account. After spending a few hours trying to figure out why the internet was so slow, he discovered someone was using his machine to distribute porn, some of which was of questionable legality.
This was back in probably 95 or 96, so i'm sure in the intervening decade distributors have got much better at it. Using a network of hijacked computers to sell your "product" would probably make reasonable sense - you certainly dont want to host it on your colo account.
This unfortunately leads us to one of two conclusions
1) spyware is a legitimate out for child porn charges 2) people should be responsible for anything that shows up on their computers
I'm sure people here will argue 2 all the way, but when it comes down to it we all make configuration mistakes. I had a disk error once result in our sendmail.cf file being truncated at 1024 bytes, which was just enough to leave it working but turn it into an open relay. I've never had random files appear on my boxes, but i'm sure part of that is luck since i'm not really obsessive about monitoring logs etc... yet i'm probably 10x better than your average computer user.
In the end we need our investigators and prosecutors to have a high degree of technical knowledge, so they can seperate out the victims from the perpatrators. Is that too much to ask?
That should give you some idea of the actual cost of providing cell service - and bear in mind that finland has half the population density of the entire USA.
1) Your WiFi provider to turn over the Mac address from the logs (if they even archive them for that long) 2) The manufacturer of your network chip to divulge which OEM it got sold to (easier if the chip belongs to dell, but many of them are broadcom) 3) The OEM to figure out whether the sold it to you directly or to a reseller
Try and downgrade from digital to analog cable. Comcast will make you return the box, and not just to your nearest comcast location, it seems they arbitrarily pick one a long way off.
I'm remarkably happy with my $11/month basic cable from them. Even figuring in Tivo, i'm running about a third of what their cheapest digital service would cost me.
A lot of your contract price goes into subsidizing the phone, i doubt many people really understand what their phone costs. I wonder how many of those 1,800 believe they paid nothing for their phone. The networks love to (and probably have to) hide the true cost of their service or else nobody would buy it.
I spend about $900 a year on phone + service + data. The iPhone would add another $175/yr into that mix - less than a 20% premium over my existing phone.
I've lived in quite a few areas, and indeed different countries, and never had poor T-Mo service - yet everywhere I go this seems to be held true.
In the UK they had 95% coverage versus vodaphones 97%, but that's not a vast difference. In Colorado their coverage seems as good as any digital service, and my phone works fine in my basement when Cingular and Verizon handsets scarely work standing on the roof.
I'm one bar short of full service in my current office and got decent coverage in my last one.
The only problem i've seen is that some of their handsets have subpar reception, particularly the tiny samsung ones.
Am i exceptionally lucky or is this an outdated myth?
There's a system in Scotland where the power company provides a circuit which provides 8 hours a day of much cheaper off-peak electric (typically used for storage heaters). They have a second circuit and meter which are toggled on/off by radio.
The end result is the power company can turn different areas on and off and consume power much more evenly.
They had to pay some support person to talk to him for those two hours, and their supervisor, and he tied up phone lines and computers on their end. The paid return postage. Then they probably needed someone in a different department to actually issue the $52.50 and then they had to pay credit card fees to return the money to his card. If they actually went ahead and returned the license to microsoft then that's yet more cost.
Companies may have very low operating expenses when everything goes to plan, but i would be surprised if it cost dell a decent multiple of 52.50 to actually process the issue.
If they start to notice it happening more often then the obvious thing to do is to build it in to the process and let people order machines without windows.
Getting the largest computer manufacturer to conceed that Windows isn't the only way would be a big win for everyone.
When will the need for parallel processing outweigh the need x86.
I've been feeling lately that clock speeds have plateaued. Both my last two laptops have had 2Ghz chips, granted i've moved from a Pentium M to a Core Duo, but we're seeing faster systems without spiraling clock rates.
I'm not sure whether it's the PC architecture or the x86 instruction set, but it seems like we rarely see PCs with more than 4 cores.
Other architectures are moving fast. I've got a 200MHz OMAP in my cellphone and they are replacing that model with a 400MHz one soon. I'm certain high end PDAs will outspec low end laptops in the next few years, which will open up a lot more architecture choices for everyone.
Why do so many industry professionals seem to suggest you need 7 passes?
Utlimately the hard drive is an analog device. When you write to it, you change the magnetic charge on small areas of the platter. I find it hard to believe that there wouldn't been some residual charge left from the previous data.
Recoving it wouldn't be easy, but i would think you could turn of error correction and repeatedly read the area looking for any statistical anomoly. The other obvious solution would be to see if you could realign the heads to read slightly to the side of the track where the wipe may not have taken.
You could also of course mount the platter in a much higher resolution drive and try to create an image where you have 4 or 8 tracks in the space where you previously had one.\
I'm not suggesting that the average tech guy could pull this off, but i'd be surprised if intelligence agencies could not.
Slashdot Mirror
In practise the coverage is pretty good in the US now.
In the UK it was very frustrating because if you signed up with one network, your phone wouldn't automatically start roaming until you left the country. If you were in an area where T-Mobile didn't have service then you were SOL, even if Orange and Vodaphone had excellent coverage there.
In the US I can roam onto dozens of different GSM networks and still get the minutes and data included in my original plan. T-Mobile's coverage sucks in the areas of Kansas that my wife's family live, but i end up some unknown network called USA 590.
And FWIW using your logic I do "pay double" for my internet connection. When someone emails or IMs me then it uses the bandwidth that I've paid for. I don't get some free extra bandwidth to cover people calling me.
Are there other countries in the world where local landline calls are free? I remember growing up in Scotland I was very envious of the fact that people could dial onto the internet and stay connected day and night because it didn't cost them a penny.
Many people here don't even carry long distance service on their landlines. There is no way they can pay per minute for any call that they make. So either the cellphone companies had to (1) create cellphones that a segment of the population can't call or (2) make them work the same way as land lines and have the cell subscriber bear the cost.
We don't really pay twice. The person *placing* the call doesn't pay a penny, it's completely free if they are in your local area (and most of the population of my state is in mine).
The only situations where a person pays to call me is if they are on another cellphone network or if they are out of state (or country). So in my case, about half my calls aren't paid for at all and of the remainder about 90% are only paid for once (although i have to pay for all of those).
I think this made a lot more sense back when cell calls were really expensive. In Britain it still costs 13p/min to call a cellphone, back in the day it was sometimes as high as 30 or 40p (US 60-80c). This meant that if I chose to only have a cellphone then my friends would have to either not call me or choose to subsidize my serivce. If I had been in the US at the time then i'd have carried the full cost of my cellphone service.
The plan you quoted only seems to have one phone not the two that we have.
Granted finland seems to pretty much lead the world in cell services. It's been 8 or 9 years since i've been there, but at that time they had better coverage and similar technology to what the US does now.
In the US, merchants are amazingly sloppy about checking a signature match.
I've routinely signed my signature on my wife's card at checkouts and on pizza orders and despite the fact that I'm obviously not a Sarah and our signatures are very different it has never been questioned.
At least in europe they actually examine the match and will require further identification if they aren't satisfied that it's a consistent signature.
Which country is that in?
In the UK I couldn't get service nearly that cheap.
Granted it would be nice if the US would let you just buy airtime from the cheapest bidder, but the current packaging system works out well for me.
Also I consider the fact that I pay for incoming calls to be a HUGE bonus. In the UK you pretty much need a landline to take business calls, new customers are much less likely to make a call that costs them 10x what a local call would. In the US it's virtually impossible for someone to tell whether you gave them a cellphone or a landline.
I'm interested to know if you really can beat this package and annual spend
* 2 lines
* 700 shared peak any-network minutes per month
* unlimited minutes to subscribers on the same network
* unlimited nights/weekend minutes
* Nokia 3166
* T-Mobile Dash (Actually an HTC Excalibur, Feel free to substitute any Windows Smartphone with Built in Wifi & Bluetooth)
* Unlimited GPRS/Edge Data
* Unlimited Access to T-Mobile Hotspot Network (worth US$20/mo)
Total annaul spend of about $1180 (including the phones). We're also in the fortuitous situation where virtually every single family member and work collegue that we call on a regular basis is also a T-Mobile subscriber - as a result we regularly use 1000 free minutes in addition to maybe 500 of our plan mintutes.
I'm not saying you can't beat that in another country, but i'd be surprised if you could do siginificantly better
Most of europe had gone to an all digital network in the early 90s - I believe you can still find areas of the US that still only have analog service. Nationwide 3G is still a pipe dream.
The US services do seem considerably cheaper. We pay about US $90/mo for two lines, 1000 "any-network" minutes, free calls to other T-Mo subscribers, unlimited edge data, unlimited hotspot access and subsidizied phones. Each of our phone numbers is also a local number which is free for any local landline to call.
When i last lived in the UK the per-minute costs were stifiling (particularly to other cell networks) and data was pretty expensive too.
I immediately wondered if they were using a 16-bit word length or some different architecture.
It's certainly not as friendly as europe, but things are definitely changing for the better in Colorado.
I technically live in an ex-burb (cringe) and they haven't finished building all the paths, but there are a few places I can get to mostly on bike trails, and within a few years we'll be connected to one of the main trail networks so i'll be able to travel to locations around 15 miles away rarely crossing any roads. A fair number of the new roads have bike lanes.
I can think of a few pedestrian bridges over major roads and a few more underpasses and there are pedestrian crossings at *most* intersections including all those in built up areas.
I can even walk from my office to my wife's office faster than i can drive (at least I can when there isn't several feet of snow on the ground).
On the other hand, I spent a night stranded in Dallas and probably spent 45 minutes trying to walk from my hotel to a shopping mall that I could see. In the end i gave up and had dinner delivered.
If you are a US Citizen then surely you can't be considered an enemy of the state until you've actually been CONVICTED of doing something wrong. Otherwise what would stop the president from declaring that "thule (9041)" is an enemy combatant and suspending your right to a fair trial.
If someone really is plotting terrorist activities on US soil then surely regular laws will be able to imprison them, try them and convict them without having to infringe on everyone elses rights.
There are rarely Wireless ISPs (excluding satelite) in areas which are well serviced by Cable.
:(
I'm presumably in the minority since I have Wireless, Cable and (several) DSL options here. The wireless turns out to be the most expensive, slowest download and fastest upload of the bunch. I like them because they are local and have competent tech support, but i doubt they are a serious threat to the big guys
I wish /. would let you edit postings. I should have used preview.
It's been a long day with to little coffee. (i jest)
Games are a very different animal. DRM isn't what stops me playing PS3 games on my laptop, or loading Wii games onto my iPod so it's a much more mute point. There's really no business case for dropping it.
For the most part, there's nothing for movies to interoperate with and CSS is so lame that it can hardly be considered DRM. Even with years of easily copied digital product, the Movie industry is doing just fine. It wouldn't make one iota of difference if they dropped CSS now.
I've never really bought from supermarkets but I can imagine that they don't get organic deliveries as frequently. We're lucky to have three (and soon four) competing organic supermarket chains in this area - now target and even walmart (on occassion) carry organic produce. Competition really drives down prices - i can now get a dozen organic cage free eggs for only 20c more than the grade A battery farmed ones.
I get all my produce delivered from these guys
http://denver.doortodoororganics.com/
They tend to only deliver stuff that's in-season, but the quality is fantastic and it's opening my eyes to more vegetables that i'd never normally buy.
I'd forgotten how fruit and vegetables were supposed to taste. The majority of the conventionally farmed stuff at the supermarkets here is decidedly mediocre, but organic food is worth it on taste alone - i eat so much more fruit now that it tastes like it's supposed to!
The first of my friends to try installing linux didn't realize the particular distribution came with FTP installed with an anonymous account. After spending a few hours trying to figure out why the internet was so slow, he discovered someone was using his machine to distribute porn, some of which was of questionable legality.
This was back in probably 95 or 96, so i'm sure in the intervening decade distributors have got much better at it. Using a network of hijacked computers to sell your "product" would probably make reasonable sense - you certainly dont want to host it on your colo account.
This unfortunately leads us to one of two conclusions
1) spyware is a legitimate out for child porn charges
2) people should be responsible for anything that shows up on their computers
I'm sure people here will argue 2 all the way, but when it comes down to it we all make configuration mistakes. I had a disk error once result in our sendmail.cf file being truncated at 1024 bytes, which was just enough to leave it working but turn it into an open relay. I've never had random files appear on my boxes, but i'm sure part of that is luck since i'm not really obsessive about monitoring logs etc... yet i'm probably 10x better than your average computer user.
In the end we need our investigators and prosecutors to have a high degree of technical knowledge, so they can seperate out the victims from the perpatrators. Is that too much to ask?
Sonera charge E2/month ($2.58) for service but you wont see them handing you a new phone each year.
_ pdf/0,2580,65423,00.pdf
http://www.sonera.fi/GetImages/GetImages_GetImage
That should give you some idea of the actual cost of providing cell service - and bear in mind that finland has half the population density of the entire USA.
The MPAA would have to get:
1) Your WiFi provider to turn over the Mac address from the logs (if they even archive them for that long)
2) The manufacturer of your network chip to divulge which OEM it got sold to (easier if the chip belongs to dell, but many of them are broadcom)
3) The OEM to figure out whether the sold it to you directly or to a reseller
It'd be easier to go after someone else.
Try and downgrade from digital to analog cable. Comcast will make you return the box, and not just to your nearest comcast location, it seems they arbitrarily pick one a long way off.
I'm remarkably happy with my $11/month basic cable from them. Even figuring in Tivo, i'm running about a third of what their cheapest digital service would cost me.
A lot of your contract price goes into subsidizing the phone, i doubt many people really understand what their phone costs. I wonder how many of those 1,800 believe they paid nothing for their phone. The networks love to (and probably have to) hide the true cost of their service or else nobody would buy it.
I spend about $900 a year on phone + service + data. The iPhone would add another $175/yr into that mix - less than a 20% premium over my existing phone.
I've lived in quite a few areas, and indeed different countries, and never had poor T-Mo service - yet everywhere I go this seems to be held true.
In the UK they had 95% coverage versus vodaphones 97%, but that's not a vast difference. In Colorado their coverage seems as good as any digital service, and my phone works fine in my basement when Cingular and Verizon handsets scarely work standing on the roof.
I'm one bar short of full service in my current office and got decent coverage in my last one.
The only problem i've seen is that some of their handsets have subpar reception, particularly the tiny samsung ones.
Am i exceptionally lucky or is this an outdated myth?
There's a system in Scotland where the power company provides a circuit which provides 8 hours a day of much cheaper off-peak electric (typically used for storage heaters). They have a second circuit and meter which are toggled on/off by radio.
The end result is the power company can turn different areas on and off and consume power much more evenly.
They had to pay some support person to talk to him for those two hours, and their supervisor, and he tied up phone lines and computers on their end. The paid return postage. Then they probably needed someone in a different department to actually issue the $52.50 and then they had to pay credit card fees to return the money to his card. If they actually went ahead and returned the license to microsoft then that's yet more cost.
Companies may have very low operating expenses when everything goes to plan, but i would be surprised if it cost dell a decent multiple of 52.50 to actually process the issue.
If they start to notice it happening more often then the obvious thing to do is to build it in to the process and let people order machines without windows.
Getting the largest computer manufacturer to conceed that Windows isn't the only way would be a big win for everyone.
When will the need for parallel processing outweigh the need x86.
I've been feeling lately that clock speeds have plateaued. Both my last two laptops have had 2Ghz chips, granted i've moved from a Pentium M to a Core Duo, but we're seeing faster systems without spiraling clock rates.
I'm not sure whether it's the PC architecture or the x86 instruction set, but it seems like we rarely see PCs with more than 4 cores.
Other architectures are moving fast. I've got a 200MHz OMAP in my cellphone and they are replacing that model with a 400MHz one soon. I'm certain high end PDAs will outspec low end laptops in the next few years, which will open up a lot more architecture choices for everyone.
Having the 2006 competition run in 2007...
It's like they are setting out to create a contest that is unclear and needlessly difficult to understand.
Do you have a source for this?
Why do so many industry professionals seem to suggest you need 7 passes?
Utlimately the hard drive is an analog device. When you write to it, you change the magnetic charge on small areas of the platter. I find it hard to believe that there wouldn't been some residual charge left from the previous data.
Recoving it wouldn't be easy, but i would think you could turn of error correction and repeatedly read the area looking for any statistical anomoly. The other obvious solution would be to see if you could realign the heads to read slightly to the side of the track where the wipe may not have taken.
You could also of course mount the platter in a much higher resolution drive and try to create an image where you have 4 or 8 tracks in the space where you previously had one.\
I'm not suggesting that the average tech guy could pull this off, but i'd be surprised if intelligence agencies could not.
I'm sure i could buy a new liver from the Russian mafia for less than the Lexmark ink required to print one.