PPC users have quite a few OS choices - none of which hold the majority share of the desktop OS market.
There are other forces here - if you really want to run linux then it's more cost effective to do so on an x86 box.
Also apple appear to innovate more that Microsoft (or at least develop cooler stuff) and MacOSX is probably the most compelling reason to buy a mac, followed closely by how cool their boxes looks.
The one area that apple could monopolize is the music store industry. If they were to stop other manufacturers implementing their format so they could drive iPod sales then that would be crossing the line.
My fiancee has had two phones with T-Mobile (US West)/Voicestream which I've managed to put other sims into without hitting any locking problems.
Similarly I got a Samsung S300 from T-Mobile (UK) which works fine with my Orange (UK) and T-Mobile (US) sim cards - although T-Mobile (UK) are ademant that this is not the case.
Perhaps T-Mobile UK and US use the provider codes such that the sim card lock treats them as the same network, but the UK sales rep told me this was not the case.
I used to have a T-Mobile UK pay as you talk phone, and that was definitely locked to t-mobile uk.
You can also sell locked phones on ebay although they dont have the same value as unlocked ones.
In the UK at least if you dont have a real signature on your signature strip then they will most likely refuse the transaction.
I know someone who on some occasions had the write the words "check id" to the upper right of her signature because people interpreted it as part of her sig.
Stores REALLY need to start reading the smart chips on cards. I've got 4 or 5 cards with those, but since moving to the USA they haven't been checked once.
The USA is indeed a very large company - nice freudian:)
The size of the country doesn't have anything much to do with it.
The USA has a population density of 30.12 km^-2 and estonia's is 31.15 km^-2 so given that every cellphone tower covers a fixed number of square km, you'll need the same number of towers per head of population to cover each country.
Since you'll be deploying about 200 times more towers in the USA, you'll have slightly higher costs connecting them together - but that should be offset by the economies of scale.
Estonia has a GDP per capita of USD 11k which is about a third of the US GDP - that should imply that far more people can afford cellphones in the US so it should be even more cost effective.
I believe estonia has a virtually equal population density to the USA, and yet they have two cellphone providers who literally blanket the whole country. I suspect their monthly incomes are also a lot lower than the US.
Why doesn't america have coast to coast digital cellphone coverage? Because cell companies would rather provide dozens of competing services in california, than one in rural arkansas.
I think the UK had some restriction on 3G bidders that required them to cover 90% of the population with X years of starting to deploy their network. Seems like a good idea.
I've never been to kazakhstan or kyrgyzstan but i have been to estonia a couple of times and it's got a very well developed economy, 100% nationwide cellphone coverage and a fairly well developed internet infrastructure (though it was slow in 99).
It's pretty inconcievable to think of microsoft not covering estonian - even though there are only ~4 million speakers (maybe less, i cant really remember). It's also very close to finnish and uses a western character set, so relatively easy to work with.
US companies aren't permitted to do business with iran and so it'd be a fairly gray area if they chose to develop an iran-localized windows.
That said, iran does seem to be the most internet developed "axis-of-evil", they even have an ipv6 prescence.
I used to dial up from 3 different addresses in the UK, one BT business, one BT home, and one telewest home and rarely had any trouble getting the full 56k. Sometimes i'd get 48 or 53 but mostly it was 56.
I'm sure it does depend on how far you go before your signal goes digital, but that's unlikely to ever be more than a few hundred feet in most civilised places.
A couple of years back we had an IR blaster connected to snapstream controlling a sony sky box - it worked pretty well. Similarly we've got a tivo controlling a panasonic sky box now.
Some of the telewest boxes use a funky frequency (some deviant form of irda i think) and dont work with ir blasters - but from what i've heard you can get telewest to replace it since it doesn't work with your universal remote.
Fucking up doesn't have to be an entirely negative thing... it's never a great idea but you can get a measure for how teams and people really perforce when the shit hits the fan.
Surviving emergencies also makes you stronger and makes it blindly obvious which processes, code (and to a lesser extent people) need improvment.
Blaming people is rarely worthwhile. If you present the facts then most half competant managers will know who's to blame anyway.
There's no point in making yourself out to be a whiner. Make constructive and reasonable suggestions. There's no point in asking for 50 new staff and 23" flat panels for everyone since it's very unlikely to happen, but if your suggestion will return on its investment then management might be interested.
Also, make sure you've got a few positive suggestions up your sleeve, so when someone asks "Bob, what could we have done better last quarter?" you've got something constructive to say.
Well i'm not too up on the high end stuff, but i cant see any obvious reason why you couldn't have multiple controllers.
Also you'll need to share your PCI bandwidth with other cards, like maybe a gigabit ethernet. I'm not sure if any p4 boards can match the speed of sun's pci system.
Google as a whole rarely seems to go down, but since it runs on lots of commodity linux boxes some of them must surely crash sometimes.
Due to the distributed nature of google, if a single machine went down then i'm sure the worse that could happen is that some possible search results aren't returned for a query - not something you'd really notice.
Likewise i've rarely noticed hotmail being down, but i've noticed times when i cant get to my account. I'm not sure how google could avoid having a similar problem.
Surely if you are doing any high end visualization then you'd hook a T3 up with fibrechannel. Of course the blade will give you a 66MHz 64-bit PCI slot which should let you shift over 500 megabytes a second.
I get particularly fed up when instructors demand submissions in a certain format, like a proprietory word processor which will remain unnamed.
Given that our school used to be 90% linux that seemed particularly unfair. Granted they did offer free Office licenses for students own computers but that doesn't help everyone.
I've been accused of plagurism, which I absolutely did not do, and had to drag the departmental heads into a meeting and fight my case. Automated checkers cause far too many problems. My work was clearly intercepted heading to the print queue and retyped into micrsoft word, complete with capital I as a loop variable:)
The point is that electronic submission should be secure, so that other people cant rip off your submission as it's been handed in. Lecturers should work on requiring GPG'd submissions to keep stuff safe.
Perhaps we are talking about different BT services.
I'm talking about fixed wireless as a last mile home broadband solution. They are trialling that in Ballingry which is very near me and a relatively impoverished area - i doubt they'd have many takers there for a 85 quid a month!
http://www.itweek.co.uk/News/1151646
It seems to be being billed as an ADSL equivilent for rural areas... so i presumed similar pricing.
The majority of the DSL providers aren't quite BT resellers but the last mile is operated by BT so you have to put up with their problems.
There are a few like ednet who take advantage of local loop unbundling to put their own systems in BT's exchanges - allowing them to offer SDSL and similar.
Whilst you can create art with it, its generally used for photo-editing and any gallery is a tribute to the photographer and not the tools.
Some of corels demo stuff was very impressive, but i doubt there's much that can be done in PS that cant be done in GIMP, but personally i think PS is a more productive tool.
It would have been banned in one of my maths classes (since my bro is taking the class now and it is) but it was a godsend. I picked up a few in Canada because it hadn't been released in the uk at that point.
One of my lecturers jaw literally dropped when i showed it performing some complex integration that he'd spent 10 minutes doing by hand, in a single step and complete with greek symbols.
I don't really buy the argument that it's 'cheating' to have a calc like that. Learning how to master your calculator takes about as long as learning the techniques themselves, but it's invaluable to double checking answers and the likes.
Pizza/Chinese/Indian places which i'll use regardless of whether or not i can get money off. I keep a pile of flyers around so that when i want to order pizza i can pick the best deal.
Supermarkets that i'll go to regardless of money off
Victoria's Secret who i bought from once 4 years ago:)
Various electronic products from companies i've bought from previously.
Every time i get one of those items it costs a significant amount to the sender.
Email IS different but I don't object to receiving offers from safeway, papa johns, silicon group etc.. since they are potentially useful to me. There just aren't that many companies which have that potential and as long as i could filter out my *real* email I guess i'm not too bothered if all 5 super market chains email me every week.
What pisses me off is the adverts for stuff I'll never use. I've never expressed any interet in 99% of the stuff that arrives in my inbox.
In general i'm not too bother about regular dead tree advertising. In general it's *fairly* well targetted and a good enough source of things like pizza coupons.
If spam was targetted to me and *clearly* marked so it didn't interfere with my regular emailling, and allowed me to easily unsubscribe - i dont think i'd mind too much.
I have no need for penis enlargement pills, but don't objected to what are technically unsolicited adverts from my local computer store. Even if I wanted to take advantage of 90% of spam I couldn't because i dont live in the US.... that's just wasteful.
Slashdot Mirror
PPC users have quite a few OS choices - none of which hold the majority share of the desktop OS market.
There are other forces here - if you really want to run linux then it's more cost effective to do so on an x86 box.
Also apple appear to innovate more that Microsoft (or at least develop cooler stuff) and MacOSX is probably the most compelling reason to buy a mac, followed closely by how cool their boxes looks.
The one area that apple could monopolize is the music store industry. If they were to stop other manufacturers implementing their format so they could drive iPod sales then that would be crossing the line.
Whilst turbo codes are cool, as the article points out they were developed in 1993. I graduated last year and we covered them on my course.
Now they are a fairly obvious choice in any digital communications system and it's hardly groundbreaking that someone has chosen to use them.
This isn't always correct.
My fiancee has had two phones with T-Mobile (US West)/Voicestream which I've managed to put other sims into without hitting any locking problems.
Similarly I got a Samsung S300 from T-Mobile (UK) which works fine with my Orange (UK) and T-Mobile (US) sim cards - although T-Mobile (UK) are ademant that this is not the case.
Perhaps T-Mobile UK and US use the provider codes such that the sim card lock treats them as the same network, but the UK sales rep told me this was not the case.
I used to have a T-Mobile UK pay as you talk phone, and that was definitely locked to t-mobile uk.
You can also sell locked phones on ebay although they dont have the same value as unlocked ones.
In the UK at least if you dont have a real signature on your signature strip then they will most likely refuse the transaction.
I know someone who on some occasions had the write the words "check id" to the upper right of her signature because people interpreted it as part of her sig.
Stores REALLY need to start reading the smart chips on cards. I've got 4 or 5 cards with those, but since moving to the USA they haven't been checked once.
The USA is indeed a very large company - nice freudian :)
The size of the country doesn't have anything much to do with it.
The USA has a population density of 30.12 km^-2 and estonia's is 31.15 km^-2 so given that every cellphone tower covers a fixed number of square km, you'll need the same number of towers per head of population to cover each country.
Since you'll be deploying about 200 times more towers in the USA, you'll have slightly higher costs connecting them together - but that should be offset by the economies of scale.
Estonia has a GDP per capita of USD 11k which is about a third of the US GDP - that should imply that far more people can afford cellphones in the US so it should be even more cost effective.
I believe estonia has a virtually equal population density to the USA, and yet they have two cellphone providers who literally blanket the whole country. I suspect their monthly incomes are also a lot lower than the US.
Why doesn't america have coast to coast digital cellphone coverage? Because cell companies would rather provide dozens of competing services in california, than one in rural arkansas.
I think the UK had some restriction on 3G bidders that required them to cover 90% of the population with X years of starting to deploy their network. Seems like a good idea.
I encountered a vehicle on a trip to las vegas that was definitely spewing out K band radar.
I'm pretty sure it was a cadillac of some sort with a old couple in it, but i've never seen that problem at any other time.
Of course driving past supermarkets with automatic doors causes problems..
I've never been to kazakhstan or kyrgyzstan but i have been to estonia a couple of times and it's got a very well developed economy, 100% nationwide cellphone coverage and a fairly well developed internet infrastructure (though it was slow in 99).
It's pretty inconcievable to think of microsoft not covering estonian - even though there are only ~4 million speakers (maybe less, i cant really remember). It's also very close to finnish and uses a western character set, so relatively easy to work with.
US companies aren't permitted to do business with iran and so it'd be a fairly gray area if they chose to develop an iran-localized windows.
That said, iran does seem to be the most internet developed "axis-of-evil", they even have an ipv6 prescence.
Microsoft aren't likely to support whatever language they speak in iran, since they are unlikely to sell their software because it'll just be pirated.
IIRC kde runs just fine in farsi and localizing other OS applications should be very straightforward.
I find it very interesting that even in countries where piracy is unchecked, people still choose to run OS.
I used to dial up from 3 different addresses in the UK, one BT business, one BT home, and one telewest home and rarely had any trouble getting the full 56k. Sometimes i'd get 48 or 53 but mostly it was 56.
I'm sure it does depend on how far you go before your signal goes digital, but that's unlikely to ever be more than a few hundred feet in most civilised places.
A couple of years back we had an IR blaster connected to snapstream controlling a sony sky box - it worked pretty well. Similarly we've got a tivo controlling a panasonic sky box now.
Some of the telewest boxes use a funky frequency (some deviant form of irda i think) and dont work with ir blasters - but from what i've heard you can get telewest to replace it since it doesn't work with your universal remote.
Fucking up doesn't have to be an entirely negative thing... it's never a great idea but you can get a measure for how teams and people really perforce when the shit hits the fan.
Surviving emergencies also makes you stronger and makes it blindly obvious which processes, code (and to a lesser extent people) need improvment.
Blaming people is rarely worthwhile. If you present the facts then most half competant managers will know who's to blame anyway.
I'd agree with this one - stay positive.
There's no point in making yourself out to be a whiner. Make constructive and reasonable suggestions. There's no point in asking for 50 new staff and 23" flat panels for everyone since it's very unlikely to happen, but if your suggestion will return on its investment then management might be interested.
Also, make sure you've got a few positive suggestions up your sleeve, so when someone asks "Bob, what could we have done better last quarter?" you've got something constructive to say.
Well i'm not too up on the high end stuff, but i cant see any obvious reason why you couldn't have multiple controllers.
Also you'll need to share your PCI bandwidth with other cards, like maybe a gigabit ethernet. I'm not sure if any p4 boards can match the speed of sun's pci system.
Google as a whole rarely seems to go down, but since it runs on lots of commodity linux boxes some of them must surely crash sometimes.
Due to the distributed nature of google, if a single machine went down then i'm sure the worse that could happen is that some possible search results aren't returned for a query - not something you'd really notice.
Likewise i've rarely noticed hotmail being down, but i've noticed times when i cant get to my account. I'm not sure how google could avoid having a similar problem.
That's for your OS and software.
Surely if you are doing any high end visualization then you'd hook a T3 up with fibrechannel. Of course the blade will give you a 66MHz 64-bit PCI slot which should let you shift over 500 megabytes a second.
I get particularly fed up when instructors demand submissions in a certain format, like a proprietory word processor which will remain unnamed.
:)
Given that our school used to be 90% linux that seemed particularly unfair. Granted they did offer free Office licenses for students own computers but that doesn't help everyone.
I've been accused of plagurism, which I absolutely did not do, and had to drag the departmental heads into a meeting and fight my case. Automated checkers cause far too many problems. My work was clearly intercepted heading to the print queue and retyped into micrsoft word, complete with capital I as a loop variable
The point is that electronic submission should be secure, so that other people cant rip off your submission as it's been handed in. Lecturers should work on requiring GPG'd submissions to keep stuff safe.
I'm still using 4x5 - though after the film i've got an entirely digital workflow...
Perhaps we are talking about different BT services.
I'm talking about fixed wireless as a last mile home broadband solution. They are trialling that in Ballingry which is very near me and a relatively impoverished area - i doubt they'd have many takers there for a 85 quid a month!
http://www.itweek.co.uk/News/1151646
It seems to be being billed as an ADSL equivilent for rural areas... so i presumed similar pricing.
The majority of the DSL providers aren't quite BT resellers but the last mile is operated by BT so you have to put up with their problems.
There are a few like ednet who take advantage of local loop unbundling to put their own systems in BT's exchanges - allowing them to offer SDSL and similar.
Other options round here - of course none *actually* here.
BT (Wireless)
11Mbit shared
Similar to their ADSL pricing I believe - though it's only in trial.
Telewest/Blueyonder (Cable)
1Mbit/256kbit = $64 (GBP 35)
Scottish Hydro (IPoverPower)
2Mbit/2Mbit = $55 USD/month (GBP 30)
Ednet (SDSL)
2.3Mbit/2.3Mbit = $550 (GBP 299)
Whilst you can create art with it, its generally used for photo-editing and any gallery is a tribute to the photographer and not the tools.
Some of corels demo stuff was very impressive, but i doubt there's much that can be done in PS that cant be done in GIMP, but personally i think PS is a more productive tool.
It would have been banned in one of my maths classes (since my bro is taking the class now and it is) but it was a godsend. I picked up a few in Canada because it hadn't been released in the uk at that point.
One of my lecturers jaw literally dropped when i showed it performing some complex integration that he'd spent 10 minutes doing by hand, in a single step and complete with greek symbols.
I don't really buy the argument that it's 'cheating' to have a calc like that. Learning how to master your calculator takes about as long as learning the techniques themselves, but it's invaluable to double checking answers and the likes.
Well i'm guessing you get it worse than I do.
:)
In general i get ads for -
Pizza/Chinese/Indian places which i'll use regardless of whether or not i can get money off. I keep a pile of flyers around so that when i want to order pizza i can pick the best deal.
Supermarkets that i'll go to regardless of money off
Victoria's Secret who i bought from once 4 years ago
Various electronic products from companies i've bought from previously.
Every time i get one of those items it costs a significant amount to the sender.
Email IS different but I don't object to receiving offers from safeway, papa johns, silicon group etc.. since they are potentially useful to me. There just aren't that many companies which have that potential and as long as i could filter out my *real* email I guess i'm not too bothered if all 5 super market chains email me every week.
What pisses me off is the adverts for stuff I'll never use. I've never expressed any interet in 99% of the stuff that arrives in my inbox.
In general i'm not too bother about regular dead tree advertising. In general it's *fairly* well targetted and a good enough source of things like pizza coupons.
If spam was targetted to me and *clearly* marked so it didn't interfere with my regular emailling, and allowed me to easily unsubscribe - i dont think i'd mind too much.
I have no need for penis enlargement pills, but don't objected to what are technically unsolicited adverts from my local computer store. Even if I wanted to take advantage of 90% of spam I couldn't because i dont live in the US.... that's just wasteful.