>That is, the fact that you pay to receive calls. How on earth did you get there and why do you accept it?
Dead simple.
We ask the same thing when you pay to call your next door neighbour's land line.
That's free here. Therefore, when phoning a cell phone (which is within your area code, and is a local exchange) it needs to be free to the caller too.
Therefore, the one being called accepts the charge. Of course, with a landline phone, it costs nothing for a local call because you only use a circuit local to the exchange, and both of your $20/month (CDN for me) basic service fees pay for that, so the charge per local call is $0. But with a cell phone the call moves past the local exchange to the air, and someone has to pay for it.
That would be the person called.
Otherwise, all cellphones would have to be dialed as long distance calls, and they would be less popular (especially from pay-phones, where a short long-distance call costs $3 CDN per minute, rather than the $0.25 CDN unlimited local calls). Not to mention dialing out would probably then be a long distance call too, and you'd never be able to easily keep track of what's a "local" long-distance call, and one that's not "local", and therefore it'd be a PITA to figure out how much your next bill will be (not that it isn't already!).
There you go. Short and sweet.
What is stupid is the extra service charge for touch-tone when the exchange was built with touch-tone service to start with...
>If we adopted the US style of billing, I'd be utterly loath to give my number out to anyone who didn't absolutely need it. >If we shifted billing patterns I'd end up saying "listen mate, i know [blah] but this is costing me a bleeding fortune".
Yup. Pretty much that's how it works here, unless it's a company phone. >:)
>Really (and I'm not trolling here) is there any decent benefits to this billing method?
The only major one is no long-distance mobile phone calling. And simplified billing for the mobile user / simplified billing for the landline to mobile caller.
HTH -- And if your phone has caller ID (it should) you can always not pick up and wait for the voicemail.:)
Easy to do. Easy to miss one. Even by accident. Ooops... Men's room has a braille sign, but the ladies doesn't? You're screwed.
>made sure the aisleways were wide enough to accomodate a wheel chair
I guess you've never worked in a heritage building before. Or one with cinder block walls. This can be damn hard and expensive, and depending on the business and the amount of hallways, could be handled by the disabled person asking a salesclerk "I'd like to look at the xyz over there...".
>and got a few tables that were articulating to accomidate the wheelchairs to get under them.
Not too bad.
>Computer terminals were made it be sure that they had the standard ADA compliant software on them
Great... so now a company running an AS/400 has to throw away all the dumb terminals and buy an expensive and non-functional windows system. The Banks would be pleased at this, I'm sure.
>You can't please everyone and you can't expect every situation to be convered but you can try your best.
And when you don't please everyone you get sued. Yaay...
>Of course the fallacy of the argument is that the ADA doesn't require you to do any of these things either.
Oh but it does. Watch king of the hill for a good example of how the ADA can be and is abused. If the Tourette's guy can stay quiet and pass the interview, the company is boned. If the guy with no arms can avoid shaking hands, the public are boned. And if the mentally retarded teacher can squeak by, the public are boned again.
I'm all in favour of accessibility, but lines _have_ to be drawn to limit people from getting a free ride from a job because:
- Their condition makes the job too dangerous (firefighter w/o arms)
- Their condition will turn away most customers (tourette's waiter) and will destroy the business
- Their condition makes them unable to do the job (mentally retarded teacher)
I'm all for people with disabilities doing what they can do. But I just wish society and them would come to terms with the fact that when you are disabled, you are Dis Abled. ie: There's some thing you just can't do anymore. Sorry, them's the breaks, and the best society can do for you is make sure you can lead a fufilling life. And sorry, if you were once an F1 Race Car driver and you lose your sight, you're going to have to find a differently fufilling job, unless a miracle of technology comes about.
>Do you understand the notion of expotential growth?
Yes, what made you doubt otherwise?
>I doubt it will take more than 10 years for CCDs to be superior to silver halide film in basically all quality aspects.
Uhhh... you see, there's this little problem... Film can just get bigger to get a better "resolution" without serious trouble. But it always seems with CCDs they just make the cells smaller each time. I don't think it would be easy to mass produce an 8x10 CCD. Do you think it will be? Because until we can easily make huge CCDs, they will have to get continually more dense. And at some point it will be physically impossible to do so -- but you can always use bigger film.
>Every financial article ever written on the gaming industry in the last year, whether it's from Bloomberg, the Financial Times, the Economist, or just the business section of your local newspaper, disagrees with you.
>Are there any distributions that do not require an iso image download?
Slackware can still be installed from floppies, if you really want to. Too bad it doesn't support 5.25 " 1.2 MB floppies anymore. What am I going to do with those drives now?
>51" TV.... why not buy your dvd, etc. Seems like you can afford it.
Well... it is my parents' TV, of course (really the family TV -- without me it would never get hooked up properly). Yes, I live at home and don't waste government money by living in a dorm when college is close enough to drive. Same thing with them helping me with college payments too.:-)
And yeah, I do have a separate DVD. Not an exorbitant one, though. Just an Apex AD-1500/w the "improved" firmware.
>It would probably work too (drive Sony out of the market), since Microsoft's pockets are the deepest around, but it's not about to happen.
Me thinks you missed what I said:
"It's just that the industry cartel hasn't been found out yet."
It's easy to run a cartel based oligopoly, which is what's going on right now in the console business, IMHO. They simply dump their consoles on the market in unison, that's all that's necessary. If a competitor is out of the loop, too bad.
If I designed a console, and had just enough money to make the first 1000, would I be able to sell them at a profit and survive?
No, because then my game console would cost $600, and I would be unable to operate my business at a loss, because I am not funded by other arms of my company (as there would be none), and I would lack the cash to wait it out until I recouped enough money from game sales to cause a net profit.
I think the competitors have already been driven out of the market a long time ago by the then current big four -- Sega, Nintendo, Sony, and Atari.
>Dumping is selling products at a loss in order to drive competitors out of business, at which point the price is raised to profitable levels and the losses are recovered.
And this is different from how console manufacturers are operating right now... how?
They are all selling their consoles at a loss (or so people seem to think) to attact business to their side, thereby ensuring the other side goes out of business.
>People who buy consoles generally buy games as well (unless they're pirates or maybe Linux geeks), and so their purchases form a sort of 'package deal'.
So if Proctor-Silex bought Westons, and gave toasters away for free to put Hamilton-Beach out of business, that would be OK because Proctor-Silex would still make money on the toast, right?
Now, unlike bread, computer goods continually cost less to manufacture. In two years, that price will be profitable, and someone may have won or lost the console "war". Sega comes to mind as the current loser.
Price dumping it is. It's just that the industry cartel hasn't been found out yet. But, just like the vitamin cartel, it will happen, given time.
Dumping and price fixing are often illegal. I doubt they're being sold at a loss considering the legal problems they could expose themselves to. Maybe they are being sold at cost.
Either way, this is their problem, nobody else's. If you can't stand the heat, get out of the kitchen!
>I have no problem with Microsoft shutting down people that sell aids in priracy.
They aid in making backups so your kids don't destroy your hard earned property.
If you disbelieve that, then JVC and Sony are both horrible companies, since they both created VTR, which is just as useful for pirating movies as a modchip is for pirating games on the X-Box.
>As a software developer, I respect their ability to own their software, no matter what form it may take.
I might not be a software developer, but I also respect the right of a software developer to do independant research on a system and create their own software for it, indepenently. I also support the right of another software developer to modify someone else's work, much in the way I would support someone drawing on the Mona Lisa (assuming they owned it). Not that it's always a nice thing, but if you own it, it's your right (and, unlike the Mona Lisa, X-Box firmware isn't a scarce resource).
"You are not required to accept this License, since you have not signed it. However, nothing else grants you permission to modify or distribute the Program or its derivative works. These actions are prohibited by law if you do not accept this License. Therefore, by modifying or distributing the Program (or any work based on the Program), you indicate your acceptance of this License to do so, and all its terms and conditions for copying, distributing or modifying the Program or works based on it."
Finally. I've been looking for this for a LONG time.
Freon. How you've been lied to by the EPA, and how easy it is to convince an environmentalist something fine is bad.
Environmentalists are nothing but a corps. toy boy. What could be better than PhDs who won't spend the extra time to verify their work? Who will "speak out" on an issue before they're 100% certain of the truth? Philip Morris showed us just how useful doctors like these can be...
I'd trust a greenie if they'd just do some fully qualifiedreasearch. Instead all we hear is "CFCs are bad because when they mix with ozone they harm it -- no, we don't know how they get there, we think they just do. No, we haven't run any tests, but we must be right, JUST LOOK AT THE BIG HOLE. Oh, and chewbacca lives on endor.".
I think South Park put it best (but not about CFCs, I guess we'll have to wait for that):
Doo-doo-doo, da-da-do-do-wow! There's a place called the rainforest that truly sucks ass Let's knock it all down and get rid of it fast You say 'save the rainforest', but what do you know? You've never been to the rainforest before! Getting Gay with Kids is here To tell you things you might not like to hear You only fight these causes 'cos caring sells All you activists can go fuck yourselves.
Someday if we work hard boys and girls.. There'll be no more rainforests left in the entire world.. Getting Gay with Kids is here To spread the word, and bring you cheer Getting Gay with Kids is here Lets knock down the rainforest, whaddaya say? It's totally gay, It's totally gay!
>We did a blindfold test. I could hear the difference in microphone cables. Line level cables are harder but at least 80% of the class still got it.
EE says that's highly unlikely, unless you were comparing something like balanced vs. unbalanced cables. I really, really, really doubt that a reasonbly cheap Mic cable (not the absolute bottom barrel) and an expensive Mic cable have anything different other than durability (I think a 2-input summing/inverting Oscilloscope could show there's no difference). But, in the home stereo world, you don't get balanced, so you need to stick with decent quality cables.
If you're really worried, use RG-6 satellite cable for home stereo stuff. Cheap, easy to get ahold of, and if the quality is good enough to carry 1 GHz 100 ft., 20 kHz is not going to be a problem.
>Furthermore you can hear the difference between minidisc and CD and MP3.
Go here and read it. 320 kbps MP3 (which is similar to MD for recording time) is better, bar none, when coupled with a decent encoder and decoder. It actually picks up more of the (admittedly useless) frequencies that the MD doesn't.
>Furthermore you can hear the difference between a 2 million dollar Sony Oxford and a Behringer and an SSL.
Can't fault you there. But most people don't have a 2 million dollar budget.
>If you could not tell a difference professional studios would just use shit cables.
No they wouldn't. In a professional studio, cables get stepped on, ends crushed, and they get yanked out of the sockets by the cable. They need the durability that a good cable brings. Not to mention that you're looking at 100ft.+ runs -- you don't want a cable with high resistance. They don't need a cable that goes flaky the fist time the audio engineer rolls his chair over it.
>There is a difference its just that for some electrical applications the difference is less.
Seriously, electrical applications (by which I'll assume all electronic applications) often work in the Ghz range. Even a $100/ft. Balanced XLR cord won't handle that, nosiree.
But audio frequencies aren't even within a factor of 100 of that.
>Use good cables for speakers
Use 16 or (if you can find it and have high-current speakers/stereos) 14 AWG lamp cord for speakers. Nice and flexible, and unless you run it parallel with your fluorescent light ballasts/power cables, very clean sound.
>Use pretty good cables for line level signals and you should be ok.
Of any signals, line level reqiures the best cables. We're talking less than 1V signal level in some applications. Thin, crappy cable will not do.
Slashdot Mirror
>That is, the fact that you pay to receive calls. How on earth did you get there and why do you accept it?
:)
Dead simple.
We ask the same thing when you pay to call your next door neighbour's land line.
That's free here. Therefore, when phoning a cell phone (which is within your area code, and is a local exchange) it needs to be free to the caller too.
Therefore, the one being called accepts the charge. Of course, with a landline phone, it costs nothing for a local call because you only use a circuit local to the exchange, and both of your $20/month (CDN for me) basic service fees pay for that, so the charge per local call is $0. But with a cell phone the call moves past the local exchange to the air, and someone has to pay for it.
That would be the person called.
Otherwise, all cellphones would have to be dialed as long distance calls, and they would be less popular (especially from pay-phones, where a short long-distance call costs $3 CDN per minute, rather than the $0.25 CDN unlimited local calls). Not to mention dialing out would probably then be a long distance call too, and you'd never be able to easily keep track of what's a "local" long-distance call, and one that's not "local", and therefore it'd be a PITA to figure out how much your next bill will be (not that it isn't already!).
There you go. Short and sweet.
What is stupid is the extra service charge for touch-tone when the exchange was built with touch-tone service to start with...
>If we adopted the US style of billing, I'd be utterly loath to give my number out to anyone who didn't absolutely need it.
>If we shifted billing patterns I'd end up saying "listen mate, i know [blah] but this is costing me a bleeding fortune".
Yup. Pretty much that's how it works here, unless it's a company phone. >:)
>Really (and I'm not trolling here) is there any decent benefits to this billing method?
The only major one is no long-distance mobile phone calling. And simplified billing for the mobile user / simplified billing for the landline to mobile caller.
HTH -- And if your phone has caller ID (it should) you can always not pick up and wait for the voicemail.
>We ordered a few signs that had braile on them
Easy to do. Easy to miss one. Even by accident. Ooops... Men's room has a braille sign, but the ladies doesn't? You're screwed.
>made sure the aisleways were wide enough to accomodate a wheel chair
I guess you've never worked in a heritage building before. Or one with cinder block walls. This can be damn hard and expensive, and depending on the business and the amount of hallways, could be handled by the disabled person asking a salesclerk "I'd like to look at the xyz over there...".
>and got a few tables that were articulating to accomidate the wheelchairs to get under them.
Not too bad.
>Computer terminals were made it be sure that they had the standard ADA compliant software on them
Great... so now a company running an AS/400 has to throw away all the dumb terminals and buy an expensive and non-functional windows system. The Banks would be pleased at this, I'm sure.
>You can't please everyone and you can't expect every situation to be convered but you can try your best.
And when you don't please everyone you get sued. Yaay...
>Of course the fallacy of the argument is that the ADA doesn't require you to do any of these things either.
Oh but it does. Watch king of the hill for a good example of how the ADA can be and is abused. If the Tourette's guy can stay quiet and pass the interview, the company is boned. If the guy with no arms can avoid shaking hands, the public are boned. And if the mentally retarded teacher can squeak by, the public are boned again.
I'm all in favour of accessibility, but lines _have_ to be drawn to limit people from getting a free ride from a job because:
- Their condition makes the job too dangerous (firefighter w/o arms)
- Their condition will turn away most customers (tourette's waiter) and will destroy the business
- Their condition makes them unable to do the job (mentally retarded teacher)
I'm all for people with disabilities doing what they can do. But I just wish society and them would come to terms with the fact that when you are disabled, you are Dis Abled. ie: There's some thing you just can't do anymore. Sorry, them's the breaks, and the best society can do for you is make sure you can lead a fufilling life. And sorry, if you were once an F1 Race Car driver and you lose your sight, you're going to have to find a differently fufilling job, unless a miracle of technology comes about.
>This is a required lab project for EE majors.
:-)
Not even that hard.
It's a required project for High-School Electronics.
Mine says "Line Feed".
If you weren't a dickhead, you'd realize that means leaving a package unattended on his doorstep for about 6 hours.
Would you leave mommy's computer on your doorstep for 6 hours with a big sign that says "NEW COMPUTER HERE" on it?
>Do you understand the notion of expotential growth?
Yes, what made you doubt otherwise?
>I doubt it will take more than 10 years for CCDs to be superior to silver halide film in basically all quality aspects.
Uhhh... you see, there's this little problem... Film can just get bigger to get a better "resolution" without serious trouble. But it always seems with CCDs they just make the cells smaller each time. I don't think it would be easy to mass produce an 8x10 CCD. Do you think it will be? Because until we can easily make huge CCDs, they will have to get continually more dense. And at some point it will be physically impossible to do so -- but you can always use bigger film.
But I played one in the highschool darkroom. :-)
We're all talking 35 mm film here, comparing it with specialized, super-expensive cameras.
Wouldn't someone that worried about resolution be using large format film like 8"x10"?
I doubt digital is within overtaking that. I would venture a guess of another 50 years before it can do that.
>Speed limit is 55 or 65 mph in the US...
Speed most people drive is 85 or 95 mph in the US.
>Every financial article ever written on the gaming industry in the last year, whether it's from Bloomberg, the Financial Times, the Economist, or just the business section of your local newspaper, disagrees with you.
Yeah, after I wrote that I rethought myself...
>Are there any distributions that do not require an iso image download?
Slackware can still be installed from floppies, if you really want to. Too bad it doesn't support 5.25 " 1.2 MB floppies anymore. What am I going to do with those drives now?
>51" TV.... why not buy your dvd, etc. Seems like you can afford it.
:-)
/w the "improved" firmware.
Well... it is my parents' TV, of course (really the family TV -- without me it would never get hooked up properly). Yes, I live at home and don't waste government money by living in a dorm when college is close enough to drive. Same thing with them helping me with college payments too.
And yeah, I do have a separate DVD. Not an exorbitant one, though. Just an Apex AD-1500
>It would probably work too (drive Sony out of the market), since Microsoft's pockets are the deepest around, but it's not about to happen.
Me thinks you missed what I said:
"It's just that the industry cartel hasn't been found out yet."
It's easy to run a cartel based oligopoly, which is what's going on right now in the console business, IMHO. They simply dump their consoles on the market in unison, that's all that's necessary. If a competitor is out of the loop, too bad.
If I designed a console, and had just enough money to make the first 1000, would I be able to sell them at a profit and survive?
No, because then my game console would cost $600, and I would be unable to operate my business at a loss, because I am not funded by other arms of my company (as there would be none), and I would lack the cash to wait it out until I recouped enough money from game sales to cause a net profit.
I think the competitors have already been driven out of the market a long time ago by the then current big four -- Sega, Nintendo, Sony, and Atari.
>I wasn't solving your problem.
:-)
Was I solving yours?
>Dumping is selling products at a loss in order to drive competitors out of business, at which point the price is raised to profitable levels and the losses are recovered.
And this is different from how console manufacturers are operating right now... how?
They are all selling their consoles at a loss (or so people seem to think) to attact business to their side, thereby ensuring the other side goes out of business.
>People who buy consoles generally buy games as well (unless they're pirates or maybe Linux geeks), and so their purchases form a sort of 'package deal'.
So if Proctor-Silex bought Westons, and gave toasters away for free to put Hamilton-Beach out of business, that would be OK because Proctor-Silex would still make money on the toast, right?
Now, unlike bread, computer goods continually cost less to manufacture. In two years, that price will be profitable, and someone may have won or lost the console "war". Sega comes to mind as the current loser.
Price dumping it is. It's just that the industry cartel hasn't been found out yet. But, just like the vitamin cartel, it will happen, given time.
>Cliches don't really solve problems.
Isn't that a cliche in and of itself?
>Require zero force to work with? Is that even physically possible?
Sure, why not?
Don't breathe for one second, letter a. Two seconds, letter b. 5 minutes, CTRL-ALT-DEL.
>Since when does Black & Decker get to say what the hell I do with my toaster (oven)?
:-)
Since they invalidated your warranty for baking PCBs in there?
>MS was forced to drop price to keep up. It's called competition.
It's called "If you can't compete, you find another business".
Or at least that's what it used to be called.
I've said it before, I'll say it again: If you can't stand the heat, get out of the kitchen!
>So if I put a gun to your head and say "Give me your money or you die", then I'm not forcing you to give me your money?
Cool, that takes game consoles to a whole new level.
Unfortunately, about the worst a game console could do to you is crush your toes (assuming you drop an X-Box on them).
Go look up the legal definition of extortion before you try to use it as an example again.
>Microsoft does sell consoles at a loss
Dumping and price fixing are often illegal. I doubt they're being sold at a loss considering the legal problems they could expose themselves to. Maybe they are being sold at cost.
Either way, this is their problem, nobody else's. If you can't stand the heat, get out of the kitchen!
>I have no problem with Microsoft shutting down people that sell aids in priracy.
They aid in making backups so your kids don't destroy your hard earned property.
If you disbelieve that, then JVC and Sony are both horrible companies, since they both created VTR, which is just as useful for pirating movies as a modchip is for pirating games on the X-Box.
>As a software developer, I respect their ability to own their software, no matter what form it may take.
I might not be a software developer, but I also respect the right of a software developer to do independant research on a system and create their own software for it, indepenently. I also support the right of another software developer to modify someone else's work, much in the way I would support someone drawing on the Mona Lisa (assuming they owned it). Not that it's always a nice thing, but if you own it, it's your right (and, unlike the Mona Lisa, X-Box firmware isn't a scarce resource).
Section 5 of the GPL says...
"You are not required to accept this License, since you have not signed it. However, nothing else grants you permission to modify or distribute the Program or its derivative works. These actions are prohibited by law if you do not accept this License. Therefore, by modifying or distributing the Program (or any work based on the Program), you indicate your acceptance of this License to do so, and all its terms and conditions for copying, distributing or modifying the Program or works based on it."
Because RMS knew this could/would happen.
"Hey, fun boys, get a room!"
Finally. I've been looking for this for a LONG time.
Freon. How you've been lied to by the EPA, and how easy it is to convince an environmentalist something fine is bad.
Environmentalists are nothing but a corps. toy boy. What could be better than PhDs who won't spend the extra time to verify their work? Who will "speak out" on an issue before they're 100% certain of the truth? Philip Morris showed us just how useful doctors like these can be...
I'd trust a greenie if they'd just do some fully qualified reasearch. Instead all we hear is "CFCs are bad because when they mix with ozone they harm it -- no, we don't know how they get there, we think they just do. No, we haven't run any tests, but we must be right, JUST LOOK AT THE BIG HOLE. Oh, and chewbacca lives on endor.".
I think South Park put it best (but not about CFCs, I guess we'll have to wait for that):
Doo-doo-doo, da-da-do-do-wow!
There's a place called the rainforest that truly sucks ass
Let's knock it all down and get rid of it fast
You say 'save the rainforest', but what do you know?
You've never been to the rainforest before!
Getting Gay with Kids is here
To tell you things you might not like to hear
You only fight these causes 'cos caring sells
All you activists can go fuck yourselves.
Someday if we work hard boys and girls..
There'll be no more rainforests left in the entire world..
Getting Gay with Kids is here
To spread the word, and bring you cheer
Getting Gay with Kids is here
Lets knock down the rainforest, whaddaya say?
It's totally gay, It's totally gay!
>We did a blindfold test. I could hear the difference in microphone cables. Line level cables are harder but at least 80% of the class still got it.
EE says that's highly unlikely, unless you were comparing something like balanced vs. unbalanced cables. I really, really, really doubt that a reasonbly cheap Mic cable (not the absolute bottom barrel) and an expensive Mic cable have anything different other than durability (I think a 2-input summing/inverting Oscilloscope could show there's no difference). But, in the home stereo world, you don't get balanced, so you need to stick with decent quality cables.
If you're really worried, use RG-6 satellite cable for home stereo stuff. Cheap, easy to get ahold of, and if the quality is good enough to carry 1 GHz 100 ft., 20 kHz is not going to be a problem.
>Furthermore you can hear the difference between minidisc and CD and MP3.
Go here and read it. 320 kbps MP3 (which is similar to MD for recording time) is better, bar none, when coupled with a decent encoder and decoder. It actually picks up more of the (admittedly useless) frequencies that the MD doesn't.
>Furthermore you can hear the difference between a 2 million dollar Sony Oxford and a Behringer and an SSL.
Can't fault you there. But most people don't have a 2 million dollar budget.
>If you could not tell a difference professional studios would just use shit cables.
No they wouldn't. In a professional studio, cables get stepped on, ends crushed, and they get yanked out of the sockets by the cable. They need the durability that a good cable brings. Not to mention that you're looking at 100ft.+ runs -- you don't want a cable with high resistance. They don't need a cable that goes flaky the fist time the audio engineer rolls his chair over it.
>There is a difference its just that for some electrical applications the difference is less.
Seriously, electrical applications (by which I'll assume all electronic applications) often work in the Ghz range. Even a $100/ft. Balanced XLR cord won't handle that, nosiree.
But audio frequencies aren't even within a factor of 100 of that.
>Use good cables for speakers
Use 16 or (if you can find it and have high-current speakers/stereos) 14 AWG lamp cord for speakers. Nice and flexible, and unless you run it parallel with your fluorescent light ballasts/power cables, very clean sound.
>Use pretty good cables for line level signals and you should be ok.
Of any signals, line level reqiures the best cables. We're talking less than 1V signal level in some applications. Thin, crappy cable will not do.
Just my 2 cents.