I see what he's going for... this is basically the old Apple DuoDock concept applied to a phone, where the phone is the core device and you can use a bigger, less-conveniently-sized device to extend the utility a bit. [And yes, as I was writing this I noticed this comparison has been made elsewhere by now]
Great.
How about instead of obex and proprietary and this and that, "they" start making cell phones that "just appear" within one's device landscape? For example, when I place my cell phone near my computer, shouldn't I be able to just sync it up [didn't Palm get that ball rolling, and didn't SyncML un-motivate universal device sync...], share the display [ala those little sidecar lcd screens popping up on the outside of laptops and messenger bags now for Vista] and in both directions, have the phone keyboard appear as another UID, storage mounts as a disk, etc etc etc.
I know some of this is possible if you're running Windows and you've installed the right proprietary warez, but for those of us unencumbered by Microsoft OS products, it's catch as catch can.
How about a smart phone that implements wireless USB and the appropriate device class stuff so that I can use my future Nokia N10K or Treo 999l or whatever for all that stuff above. Hell, just mounting the filesystem when my phone and desktop or laptop are near each other without jumping through hoops would be sweet. I would buy that phone yesterday if it existed. Until then, it's openobex and quirky bluetooth connections and mild disappointment with the state of the "smart phone" world.
In retrospect, we wish we'd contacted the IT@Cork folks personally and talked over the issue before sending legal correspondence. In fact, it turns out that they asked Tim to speak at the conference, though our Web 2.0 Conference team didn't know that. We've sent a followup letter to Donagh Kiernan, agreeing that IT@Cork can use the Web 2.0 name this year. While we stand by the principle that we need to protect our "Web 2.0" mark from unauthorized use in the context of conferences, we apologize for the way we initially handled the issue with IT@Cork.
That's just an excerpt, follow the link for the whole [brief] comment. They also point out, rightfully so, that they would not be able to have a "LinuxWorld conference," and this is no different. It's a service mark, they have to defend it, end of story.
Debian-Lex is an internal project to develop Debian into an operating system that is particularly well fit for the requirements for legal offices. The goal of Debian-Lex is a complete system for all tasks in legal practice which is built completely on free software.
I subscribed to the debian lex mailing list a while ago out of curiosity. I can't say I know much more having subscribed, but perhaps there are some subscribers there with other specific ideas or answers to your question. No guarantees. Oh, IANAL.
If Kevin could start with specs for a PC motherboard and have one built to the proper dimensions, with the proper heat sink and/or fan and clearance for the proper optical drive, would this have been more fair?
In other words, Apple started out by spec'ing a mobo size (just slightly smaller than mini-itx, as someone already pointed out), and they went from there. If they had to use off-the-shelf G4 PowerPC mobos, would they have come as close as Kevin did?
At the end of the day, a broad range of formfactors and features is just better for us. If someone comes out with a suitable motherboard for mini-mac-like designs based around x86[-64], we win again.
We already have something similar here in Phoenix, though it is implemented in individual vehicles. If a single car is approaching a given red light at sufficient speed, the red light may be unsafely disregarded.
[I believe Phoenix is still number 1 in collisions or fatalities or something bad, as a result of red-light-running. If not, we will be again.]
I don't have any kids, but I've been pondering how I would go about testing to make sure SIDS doesn't happen.
How about a CO2 and O2 sensor pair that checks to make sure breathing is still going on? I'm guessing it would have to be non-invasive so that the baby doesn't get tangled up, etc.
While you're at it, since I'm in AZ I've also been pondering how to get kids to not-drown in pools. That's probably something of a follow-on project once the child can walk, though.
As for cameras, I know DLink makes wireless and wired network cameras with built-in web servers that are a little pricey, or you could run a long USB or FireWire cable from the baby room to the server.
Hmmmmm, ethernet- and/or wifi-ready baby cribs. No match on ThinkGeek. Yet.
In college my clinic team worked with Northrop Electronic Systems on their OASys project, or Obstacle Avoidance System. It was a laser + computer navigation system that would scan the horizon through smoke or other aerosols and generate a "safe passage" navigation image to the helicopter pilot using it. Supposedly it worked pretty well (they were still working on it after our 9 months on our piece of the project). It was basically a rotating laser optics assembly that would trace a cone in space, and the assembly would scan in the horizontal plane to yield the losenge shape (they used that term).
Here's a funny little twist. When we went to the site to visit the developers of the project at Northrop, we stopped off in a meeting room that had on one of the walls a poster for the OASys project, featuring a helicopter with a losenge-shaped window of visibility depicted against some trees with some smoke and other debris in the air.
Nearby on the same wall was another poster for a weapon system, the name of which escapes me. It was the same poster, but in the middle of the losenge-shaped window of visibility was a little gunsight, and I think the helecopter had some weapons slung.
We asked our liason person whether the two projects were related, and he assured us they were completely different as we were brought to another area.
Our professor on the project was a Yugoslavian National, and this was in 1992, so you can imagine how fun the rest of our visit was when they found that out....
Aside from the virtues already espoused, implementing a database application within the database app means that as long as you can send a "SELECT..." query to the database, you needn't re-implement your logic across multiple languages, platforms, etc.
What you get is a nice API for your data that is testable and perhaps even stable outside of the choices and requirements of the client app(s).
I first wrote about my Vonage experiences here on and at the time I had basically put them on probation. I fear I've given away the ending of my story in the subject line, but read on anyway.
Since then, I found that I was experiencing really bad echo on certain incoming calls, even when those calls were forwarded from my Vonage phone to my cell phone. I was asked each time I tried to add more detail (by a new tech support person each time who never bothered to read through my issue history) whether my internet connection had enough bandwidth or my phone wiring had been tested... after the second time answer the same questions, I gave up. From then on, I would file additional customer care reports on the echo, from what phone numbers I was getting the most echo for incoming calls, how outgoing calls had no echo, etc. It became a major waste of time, and the fact that Vonage refused to acknowledge that they might have problems in their PSTN-to-VOIP bridges in certain exchanges, choosing instead to pass it off on my own house wiring or internet connection after both of those were eliminated as sources of trouble early on was quite telling.
When my local phone company (Qwest) offered to switch me back for free with 2 months of free service on top of that, I took them up on it. Yes, I went back to Qwest, which is a major indicator. I had the virtual number feature, with a second line in an out-of-state area code, so I asked on the phone of a customer care rep at Vonage if my virtual number could become my primary number once the switch took place, and he assured me verbally that that was no problem.
I'll let you, reader, guess what happened. Hint: if it isn't in writing it isn't true. Especially at Vonage.
I've cancelled my Vonage service. Aside from the nice voicemail features and the useful forwarding feature, and the reasonably-low price, I found the quality of service, the quality of their technical support personnel, the startup process, and the experience on the whole to be a major disappointment. I consider myself to be an early adopter (and I've been in the tech hardware and software business for a while myself), so I was willing to cut Vonage a lot of slack early on with the stumbles and the snafus, and they took all of that slack and then some.
BTW, I would suggest a service provider that doesn't lock you out of your own ATA device. Vonage prevents you from doing much of anything that they don't approve of, which is a major minus on top of their low-grade service.
If they want to test this system out, why wouldn't they take passenger data from, say, January 2001 through, say, September 11, 2001 and run it through?
It seems to me they already know there are a few positives in that batch, arriving in the US from abroad during the year and on 4 domestic flights in September...
I've had my TiVo for about 4 years or so now, and I use the remote as little as possible. I feed my DirecTV box into it and use the remote for that to change the channels, view the DTV guide, etc. Aside from the fact that the remote sucks, I never liked the fact that changing the TiVo channel erases the 30 minute buffer (I don't keep up on TiVo hacks, so maybe there's a way around that one by now). The curvy design is annoying, and it's fallen on the ground so much because of the odd shape that it now makes the old broken-plastic-pieces-inside rattle noise.
My dad has a TiVo (a gift for my mom...) and he actually made a cradle for his so it rests flat on the table next to the couch. He likes to be able to press buttons while it's still on the table, which is all but impossible given the curviness.
For what it's worth, I think the Nokia 6190 (or the non-gsm variants) is one of my all-time favorite designs in this category. I almost wish I could turn that thing into a remote control, as the buttons, display, feel in the hand, weight, and size were just about perfect. IMHO.
I signed up with Vonage back in October, or maybe the end of September, of 2003. The intial experience was not bad at all, and in fact the Cisco ATA-186 worked flawlessly with my netfilter configuration once I setup dhcp. The intial customer support was great, with fast, meaningful responses.
I opted to transfer my old POTS phone number from Qwest, so I had a temporary Vonage phone number for incoming calls on that line. My Qwest phone number appeared as my outgoing caller-id number on the Vonage line, which was nice, since several of the people I call use caller-id and/or distinctive ring features.
Then the trouble began.
To transfer the number, you have to submit a Letter of Authorization along with a current phone bill. I asked them if I could scan and email the docs, and I got an immediate response with instructions to email attachments of the documents to a particular email address and they would print them out. I thought this was great!
First attempt, scanned them in at a resonable resolution, sent them in, got a response that they were not legible. No more informative than that.
Scanned them in again, this time at 300 dpi greyscale and sent them as TIFF documents. They looked excellent, if I may say, but the response once again was that they were not legible. I suggested that there would be no way I could fax documents at a higher resolution using any fax machine I had access to, so they cancelled my transfer.
At that point, I was a little ticked, and a couple of days later I learned that someone finally printed out the documents and they looked just fine (as expected), but then nobody got back to me and told me this (I have this email thread stored away in the Stupid folder...). But, once the process is cancelled, it has to be handled manually, which means as slowly and painfully as possible. Oh, and there was absolutely no way to get them to put that to-be-transfered number back as my outgoing caller-id number, so everyone would answer with "what number is this?" or "where are you calling from?" or just not answer (I get that enough when they know it's me...).
On November 19, 2003, my number was transfered. Okay, actually on November 20. Well, actually on November 21. Wait, it was done on November 22. But remember, I had that Temporary number, which meant that even thought my Qwest number was now transfered, it didn't work. My outgoing caller-id was wrong, and my incoming calls would go to voicemail okay, but then my voicemail box was assigned to the temporary number. The email notifications of this process were not useful, and in fact they never sent a final email when the transfer was "complete."
It took a good week of emails, and finally I got on the phone for 75 minutes (timer running, that's the acual elapsed time) with a tech support person there who actually asked me for my login password (which I did not give him-- so they simply reset it on their end and logged in anyway). By the time I was on the phone, just about nothing was working according to plan.
In the end, I lost access to my voicemail box twice, had this number transfer go completely sour, had a very negative experience with the number transfer person (I have her name but won't bash her here), and presently my main issue is the intermittent and extremely annoying echo on my end of the calls. The Vonage FAQ suggests this happens with some handsets, but as it happens, one of my best buds from college is a VoIP developer at Cisco and gave me the 411... basically, Vonage has to fix that little feature, but I don't fell like spending an hour hearing about how the FAQ spells it out for me (incorrectly).
To be fair, Vonage service is lower in price than Qwest service was for residential use (in Arizona) and the feature set is fine. I pulled the outside wires from the phone junction box (they're rj-11 plugs) and plugged the Cisco ATA box into my house wiring, works without a hitch (before
Okay, it was 20 years ago, but even then it was on the edge of questionable. This dodgy-factor was from a few students, though, and not from unwelcome visitors. The school is in an older part of town in a fairly high-traffic area (it's on 19th avenue, a major thoroughfare) but it is by no means an "inner city" school. Back then the school itself was surrounded by chain link fences and all classrooms have windows, with no hallways. Perhaps they've had these bad characters sneaking on to campus, but I would be surprised if they would go to the front office from there.
Unless something has changed, this school is two fences and a concrete walkway away from the district office. Maybe that has something to do with the selection of the location.
Sheriff Joe always seems to come up with new ways of raising eyebrows here in Phoenix. If you look him up on google, you'll find he also had cameras pointing at prisoners, he makes people wear black-and-white stripes in jail, he feeds then the bare minimum for food sometimes, and he has this "tent city" that I hear is not a fun place to visit at all. I expect we'll eventually have to start carrying our identification papers if he stays in office.
Had Apple continued the efforts to move to x86 compatibility, they may have actually reached a comfortable place where they could build their software on multiple platforms much sooner.
Maybe that sounds like a "just software" marketing statement, but the effort that went into the porting project should have at least resulted in code that isn't wrapped to tightly with the hardware.
Having done work on PPcP (aka CHRP aka PReP) hardware when that whole SolarisPPC+WinNTPPC+MacOS+AIX dream was alive, I have to say that the thought of having that sort of flexibility was cool in more than a nerdy way. This is hindsight as well, but today there are those who dual-boot Windows and Linux. How interesting would it have been to be able to dual-boot Windows and MacOS?
Someone else in this thread mentioned the control of hardware. More hindsight, but Jobs came in and cut a lot of hardware development out of the mix. Granted, it was printers and imaging that got the big axe, but I have to wonder whether Apple could have done better sooner to go with open platforms (which PPcP was supposed to be, but way too late) and maybe multiple-ISA support, in the form of HALs or maybe the use of what they learned in that porting process to make more portable code in general. Would the change to this new Mac OS X architecture have been required-- and so delayed-- if the older codebase could actually have been recompiled more easily to run on 486, pentium, 68K, PPC601, then PII, PPC603/604, then PIII and the G4 stuff, and now Opteron, Itanium, and G5?
The comparison to Dell from a business perspective is difficult, since Dell innovated in product delivery, not product development (this was stated), but loss-of-hardware-control issues aside, Apple would not be a in a bad position if Dell could ship MacOS-86 machines to some percentage of their cutomers. The Mac back then had a great market presence (if not market share), Apple had prime brand recognition, and their customers would have appreciated being able to use their favorite software without having to convince their IT department to buy more expensive hardware.
I have to wonder if Apple and MacOS could have been doing back then what Linux and *BSD are doing now as far as "portable" software development. Remember, Windows 3.1 was big, but what if MacOS was running cross-platform when Windows95 had been released? MS makes a ton on Office anyway... probably could have witnessed MSOffice running on MacOS on an Itanium desktop machine, with Netscape Communicator in a window behind it.
A long time ago (25 years?) there was a company called ON TV in Phoenix that broadcast their pay signals over a normal UHF channel (channel 15 I think). They had a contract with the local indy station to take over their broadcasts from something like 7pm until some odd hour in the mornning.
In order to receive the channel content, you had to have/rent/purchase a decoder box that had nothing but a big knob on it that said-- wait for it-- Off and ON.
My grandmother had one. It worked well enough. Nothing special, really. But it was pay tv over a "free" broadcast channel. Everyone received it for free, but you had to pay to decode it.
Won't the true US high tech office of the future consist of a project manager's desk and a VoIP video phone that connects to the development team in India?
I mean the very near future.
A bit further down the roard the development team will be in Romania.
Counters allege, however, that Mindplay effectively alters the odds, something they say goes against regulations prohibiting anyone -- even casinos -- from using devices for such purposes.
which is interesting, because casinos could always use the human-operated PTZ cameras that watch everything (even the players) on the gaming floor, and of course dealers and pit bosses are always on the lookout as well, but this does raise the bar into questionable territory if only because, like a red light camera, it is operating against you on its own and you really have nobody to "fight" if it decides you are nailed. Perhaps they might review the video of your 100 allegedly-counted hands?
However, if a system like this does roll out into real use, it should be presumed that every MIT kid on their counting team read this,
"The current state of technology in gaming had fallen way behind other industries," said MindPlay president and CEO Richard Soltys. "They're very slow to move forward. (Now) there's nothing players can do that MindPlay can't detect."
and is already scheming. I would be to, and I don't even count cards. It's as though Mr. Soltys is looking right at the reader while he says, "Bring it on!"
I knew a guy who counted cards and used chip-palming techniques to keep his chip count reasonable. Switch tables and even casinos frequently, be patient, and if possible play with a team. The camera system doesn't seem to have that stuff covered. I predict the primary way of catching rule-breakers will remain the old fashioned way... half instinct, half suspicious and watchful eye.
I'm guessing there are some legal strings attached, but I wonder whether a fully AOL-capable version of Mozilla, distrbuted almost like the original AOL virus itself (in this case, I would, for example, bring over an install CD to help my AOL-using parents to move beyond IE... even better if they could get around AOL 7.0 or whatever they're using). Yes, they can use whatever browser they want, but how about an email client that works?
Is there a legal barrier in place to prevent this, especially from former (and whoafully under appreciated) employees ? Since AOL never followed through while they were there, I think the only real justice at this point would be to let loose better, cross-platform software for the AOL userbase out there. Who knows, maybe some linux users will make the switch to AOL...
As an aside, a few troll comments here and there have suggested that now IE can be the one true client to create web content for... I give such commentary little credence, but is the SCO action on IBM (et al.) and the AOL action on Mozilla just bad timing, or is the fact that Microsoft money flows to both make any more interesting their coincidence?
Maybe useful... if you check under "Multimedia Center" rather than "Graphic Driver" and then check "Linux" as the platform, drivers for the recent ATI offerings are listed, along with the familiar download page that I remember seeing a couple of months ago when I was looking for this stuff. This is visible here. It would appear that these point to the FireGL driver anyway, so all this does is offer some reassurance that recent cards are still listed with Linux drivers...
I don't actually have an ATI card at the moment, so YMV.
Recently there was an article posted here about taxes on cable modems here, but it occurs to me that spam, like postal junk mail, could help pay for infrastructure just as easily.
Not an original idea, but like a state sales tax (or one of several European VATs), the onus would be on the merchants, or in this case those relaying spam, to collect and pay up.
Now, since American companies are being required to collect and disperse VAT for sales made in Europe, surely there will be some sort of reciprocity there, and in general America (or the states therein) would impose sanctions on countries that did not abide by these new spam tax laws.
With spam in the news as much as it has been lately, surely some government types will take notice, that there is cash sitting in their inbox (or in their filtered spam folder if they're smart). And SpamAssassin catches a huge percentage of the spam I get lately, so if my mail machine has to do a little bit of filtering so that middle America can get cable modems and dsl, and so that maybe the last mile can be fiber someday, well, I'll bite the bullet, as long as I don't have to pay cable modem taxes or any other such things and get this spam.
It is unfortunate that things have to go this way, but until this silliness is brought home-- literally-- the masses can't get behind any effort to put a stop to it.
Does the DMCA make life difficult or inconvenient for your family or non-technical friends? Probably not. Not in a way that they notice or associate with anything in particular. Not being able to rip music CDs may impact a reasonable chunk of the voting public, but no critical mass there.
Wait until your parents want to Tivo their favorite TV show or a movie on a premium station that they pay extra for, but they find out that not only can they not record that show or movie, but in fact the Tivo is not really functional at all anymore... and maybe their VCR doesn't record everything they want, either.
When voters are effected by this stuff, and when they are effected enough so that they get angry, matters like this will suddenly get the attention they deserve. So long as lobbyists and campaign contributors are the only ones making noise, there won't be anything reasonable coming out of our politicians.
At least FCC Chairman Michael Powell likes his Tivo, so maybe there will be some advocacy there. Maybe.
At first I was mildly intrigued by the look of the 3650, and since T-Mobile (my carrier in AZ) actually offers the phone directly, I did some looking around... bottom line, pass on it (IMHO).
Others have pointed out the flaky Nokia bluetooth stuff, and the lack of syncml might actually be a bigger minus that I would have thought initially (I have an Ericsson R520 with all sorts of features, syncml among them, and I am just now starting to exercise the phone's feature set).
The keypad has to go.
I usually stop by here to get some phone scoopage (there are certainly many, many other sites as well). They have a review of the 3650 at the bottom-- or use the review search feature-- with the final thoughts (on page 3 of the review) rather humorous, but probably too true to be ignored.
Also on that site I found a review of the Siemens S55 which made me want to read more about the current and upcoming Siemens offerings. On the same site yet again is an article covering just that topic, about the upcoming SX1 and others from Siemens. The SX1 looks like it takes alternative keypad design in a slightly more functional direction.
Having tried out the Jabra FreeSpeak with my R520 (successfully and satisfactorily), and with a need to use some WAP and other wireless networking features lately, I am utterly convinced that getting a phone that does what you want it to do-- well-- is essential. Look past the buzz, get what will meet your needs, and pay attention to those details about keypad quality, low-light screen readability, and other such mundane details.
Empirically, 1000 pagers (at 3-4 dial sequences per minute) equals about 4 days of constant calls to the vicitim's phone. How I know this is another discussion...
Of course, this was more effective when digital pagers were much, much more popular. Today, it probably wouldn't go over as well, but back in the late 80s and early 90s, it worked flawlessly. Essentially, it was distributed crank calling before the "DDOS" term was coined.
The most interesting part was that the pager companies explicitly refused to do anything about it. No tracing of calls, no attempts to halt sequential dialing, etc. Not their problem.
Slashdot Mirror
I see what he's going for... this is basically the old Apple DuoDock concept applied to a phone, where the phone is the core device and you can use a bigger, less-conveniently-sized device to extend the utility a bit. [And yes, as I was writing this I noticed this comparison has been made elsewhere by now]
Great.
How about instead of obex and proprietary and this and that, "they" start making cell phones that "just appear" within one's device landscape? For example, when I place my cell phone near my computer, shouldn't I be able to just sync it up [didn't Palm get that ball rolling, and didn't SyncML un-motivate universal device sync...], share the display [ala those little sidecar lcd screens popping up on the outside of laptops and messenger bags now for Vista] and in both directions, have the phone keyboard appear as another UID, storage mounts as a disk, etc etc etc.
I know some of this is possible if you're running Windows and you've installed the right proprietary warez, but for those of us unencumbered by Microsoft OS products, it's catch as catch can.
How about a smart phone that implements wireless USB and the appropriate device class stuff so that I can use my future Nokia N10K or Treo 999l or whatever for all that stuff above. Hell, just mounting the filesystem when my phone and desktop or laptop are near each other without jumping through hoops would be sweet. I would buy that phone yesterday if it existed. Until then, it's openobex and quirky bluetooth connections and mild disappointment with the state of the "smart phone" world.
That's just an excerpt, follow the link for the whole [brief] comment. They also point out, rightfully so, that they would not be able to have a "LinuxWorld conference," and this is no different. It's a service mark, they have to defend it, end of story.
I subscribed to the debian lex mailing list a while ago out of curiosity. I can't say I know much more having subscribed, but perhaps there are some subscribers there with other specific ideas or answers to your question. No guarantees. Oh, IANAL.
Debian-lex Project Page
A link to the mailing list archive-- with a couple of messages from this month!-- can be found among other bits of info there.
If Kevin could start with specs for a PC motherboard and have one built to the proper dimensions, with the proper heat sink and/or fan and clearance for the proper optical drive, would this have been more fair?
In other words, Apple started out by spec'ing a mobo size (just slightly smaller than mini-itx, as someone already pointed out), and they went from there. If they had to use off-the-shelf G4 PowerPC mobos, would they have come as close as Kevin did?
At the end of the day, a broad range of formfactors and features is just better for us. If someone comes out with a suitable motherboard for mini-mac-like designs based around x86[-64], we win again.
We already have something similar here in Phoenix, though it is implemented in individual vehicles. If a single car is approaching a given red light at sufficient speed, the red light may be unsafely disregarded.
[I believe Phoenix is still number 1 in collisions or fatalities or something bad, as a result of red-light-running. If not, we will be again.]
I don't have any kids, but I've been pondering how I would go about testing to make sure SIDS doesn't happen.
How about a CO2 and O2 sensor pair that checks to make sure breathing is still going on? I'm guessing it would have to be non-invasive so that the baby doesn't get tangled up, etc.
While you're at it, since I'm in AZ I've also been pondering how to get kids to not-drown in pools. That's probably something of a follow-on project once the child can walk, though.
As for cameras, I know DLink makes wireless and wired network cameras with built-in web servers that are a little pricey, or you could run a long USB or FireWire cable from the baby room to the server.
Hmmmmm, ethernet- and/or wifi-ready baby cribs. No match on ThinkGeek. Yet.
In college my clinic team worked with Northrop Electronic Systems on their OASys project, or Obstacle Avoidance System. It was a laser + computer navigation system that would scan the horizon through smoke or other aerosols and generate a "safe passage" navigation image to the helicopter pilot using it. Supposedly it worked pretty well (they were still working on it after our 9 months on our piece of the project). It was basically a rotating laser optics assembly that would trace a cone in space, and the assembly would scan in the horizontal plane to yield the losenge shape (they used that term).
Here's a funny little twist. When we went to the site to visit the developers of the project at Northrop, we stopped off in a meeting room that had on one of the walls a poster for the OASys project, featuring a helicopter with a losenge-shaped window of visibility depicted against some trees with some smoke and other debris in the air.
Nearby on the same wall was another poster for a weapon system, the name of which escapes me. It was the same poster, but in the middle of the losenge-shaped window of visibility was a little gunsight, and I think the helecopter had some weapons slung.
We asked our liason person whether the two projects were related, and he assured us they were completely different as we were brought to another area.
Our professor on the project was a Yugoslavian National, and this was in 1992, so you can imagine how fun the rest of our visit was when they found that out....
I agree that they're good.
Aside from the virtues already espoused, implementing a database application within the database app means that as long as you can send a "SELECT ..." query to the database, you needn't re-implement your logic across multiple languages, platforms, etc.
What you get is a nice API for your data that is testable and perhaps even stable outside of the choices and requirements of the client app(s).
I first wrote about my Vonage experiences here on and at the time I had basically put them on probation. I fear I've given away the ending of my story in the subject line, but read on anyway.
Since then, I found that I was experiencing really bad echo on certain incoming calls, even when those calls were forwarded from my Vonage phone to my cell phone. I was asked each time I tried to add more detail (by a new tech support person each time who never bothered to read through my issue history) whether my internet connection had enough bandwidth or my phone wiring had been tested... after the second time answer the same questions, I gave up. From then on, I would file additional customer care reports on the echo, from what phone numbers I was getting the most echo for incoming calls, how outgoing calls had no echo, etc. It became a major waste of time, and the fact that Vonage refused to acknowledge that they might have problems in their PSTN-to-VOIP bridges in certain exchanges, choosing instead to pass it off on my own house wiring or internet connection after both of those were eliminated as sources of trouble early on was quite telling.
When my local phone company (Qwest) offered to switch me back for free with 2 months of free service on top of that, I took them up on it. Yes, I went back to Qwest, which is a major indicator. I had the virtual number feature, with a second line in an out-of-state area code, so I asked on the phone of a customer care rep at Vonage if my virtual number could become my primary number once the switch took place, and he assured me verbally that that was no problem.
I'll let you, reader, guess what happened. Hint: if it isn't in writing it isn't true. Especially at Vonage.
I've cancelled my Vonage service. Aside from the nice voicemail features and the useful forwarding feature, and the reasonably-low price, I found the quality of service, the quality of their technical support personnel, the startup process, and the experience on the whole to be a major disappointment. I consider myself to be an early adopter (and I've been in the tech hardware and software business for a while myself), so I was willing to cut Vonage a lot of slack early on with the stumbles and the snafus, and they took all of that slack and then some.
BTW, I would suggest a service provider that doesn't lock you out of your own ATA device. Vonage prevents you from doing much of anything that they don't approve of, which is a major minus on top of their low-grade service.
If they want to test this system out, why wouldn't they take passenger data from, say, January 2001 through, say, September 11, 2001 and run it through?
It seems to me they already know there are a few positives in that batch, arriving in the US from abroad during the year and on 4 domestic flights in September...
Using the same logic, check:
googlejobs.com
googleporn.com
and so on... both of those are registered to google, by the way.
I've had my TiVo for about 4 years or so now, and I use the remote as little as possible. I feed my DirecTV box into it and use the remote for that to change the channels, view the DTV guide, etc. Aside from the fact that the remote sucks, I never liked the fact that changing the TiVo channel erases the 30 minute buffer (I don't keep up on TiVo hacks, so maybe there's a way around that one by now). The curvy design is annoying, and it's fallen on the ground so much because of the odd shape that it now makes the old broken-plastic-pieces-inside rattle noise.
My dad has a TiVo (a gift for my mom...) and he actually made a cradle for his so it rests flat on the table next to the couch. He likes to be able to press buttons while it's still on the table, which is all but impossible given the curviness.
For what it's worth, I think the Nokia 6190 (or the non-gsm variants) is one of my all-time favorite designs in this category. I almost wish I could turn that thing into a remote control, as the buttons, display, feel in the hand, weight, and size were just about perfect. IMHO.
An actual Vonage user for about 3 months now.
I signed up with Vonage back in October, or maybe the end of September, of 2003. The intial experience was not bad at all, and in fact the Cisco ATA-186 worked flawlessly with my netfilter configuration once I setup dhcp. The intial customer support was great, with fast, meaningful responses.
I opted to transfer my old POTS phone number from Qwest, so I had a temporary Vonage phone number for incoming calls on that line. My Qwest phone number appeared as my outgoing caller-id number on the Vonage line, which was nice, since several of the people I call use caller-id and/or distinctive ring features.
Then the trouble began.
To transfer the number, you have to submit a Letter of Authorization along with a current phone bill. I asked them if I could scan and email the docs, and I got an immediate response with instructions to email attachments of the documents to a particular email address and they would print them out. I thought this was great!
First attempt, scanned them in at a resonable resolution, sent them in, got a response that they were not legible. No more informative than that.
Scanned them in again, this time at 300 dpi greyscale and sent them as TIFF documents. They looked excellent, if I may say, but the response once again was that they were not legible. I suggested that there would be no way I could fax documents at a higher resolution using any fax machine I had access to, so they cancelled my transfer.
At that point, I was a little ticked, and a couple of days later I learned that someone finally printed out the documents and they looked just fine (as expected), but then nobody got back to me and told me this (I have this email thread stored away in the Stupid folder...). But, once the process is cancelled, it has to be handled manually, which means as slowly and painfully as possible. Oh, and there was absolutely no way to get them to put that to-be-transfered number back as my outgoing caller-id number, so everyone would answer with "what number is this?" or "where are you calling from?" or just not answer (I get that enough when they know it's me...).
On November 19, 2003, my number was transfered. Okay, actually on November 20. Well, actually on November 21. Wait, it was done on November 22. But remember, I had that Temporary number, which meant that even thought my Qwest number was now transfered, it didn't work. My outgoing caller-id was wrong, and my incoming calls would go to voicemail okay, but then my voicemail box was assigned to the temporary number. The email notifications of this process were not useful, and in fact they never sent a final email when the transfer was "complete."
It took a good week of emails, and finally I got on the phone for 75 minutes (timer running, that's the acual elapsed time) with a tech support person there who actually asked me for my login password (which I did not give him-- so they simply reset it on their end and logged in anyway). By the time I was on the phone, just about nothing was working according to plan.
In the end, I lost access to my voicemail box twice, had this number transfer go completely sour, had a very negative experience with the number transfer person (I have her name but won't bash her here), and presently my main issue is the intermittent and extremely annoying echo on my end of the calls. The Vonage FAQ suggests this happens with some handsets, but as it happens, one of my best buds from college is a VoIP developer at Cisco and gave me the 411... basically, Vonage has to fix that little feature, but I don't fell like spending an hour hearing about how the FAQ spells it out for me (incorrectly).
To be fair, Vonage service is lower in price than Qwest service was for residential use (in Arizona) and the feature set is fine. I pulled the outside wires from the phone junction box (they're rj-11 plugs) and plugged the Cisco ATA box into my house wiring, works without a hitch (before
Okay, it was 20 years ago, but even then it was on the edge of questionable. This dodgy-factor was from a few students, though, and not from unwelcome visitors. The school is in an older part of town in a fairly high-traffic area (it's on 19th avenue, a major thoroughfare) but it is by no means an "inner city" school. Back then the school itself was surrounded by chain link fences and all classrooms have windows, with no hallways. Perhaps they've had these bad characters sneaking on to campus, but I would be surprised if they would go to the front office from there.
Unless something has changed, this school is two fences and a concrete walkway away from the district office. Maybe that has something to do with the selection of the location.
Sheriff Joe always seems to come up with new ways of raising eyebrows here in Phoenix. If you look him up on google, you'll find he also had cameras pointing at prisoners, he makes people wear black-and-white stripes in jail, he feeds then the bare minimum for food sometimes, and he has this "tent city" that I hear is not a fun place to visit at all. I expect we'll eventually have to start carrying our identification papers if he stays in office.
Had Apple continued the efforts to move to x86 compatibility, they may have actually reached a comfortable place where they could build their software on multiple platforms much sooner.
Maybe that sounds like a "just software" marketing statement, but the effort that went into the porting project should have at least resulted in code that isn't wrapped to tightly with the hardware.
Having done work on PPcP (aka CHRP aka PReP) hardware when that whole SolarisPPC+WinNTPPC+MacOS+AIX dream was alive, I have to say that the thought of having that sort of flexibility was cool in more than a nerdy way. This is hindsight as well, but today there are those who dual-boot Windows and Linux. How interesting would it have been to be able to dual-boot Windows and MacOS?
Someone else in this thread mentioned the control of hardware. More hindsight, but Jobs came in and cut a lot of hardware development out of the mix. Granted, it was printers and imaging that got the big axe, but I have to wonder whether Apple could have done better sooner to go with open platforms (which PPcP was supposed to be, but way too late) and maybe multiple-ISA support, in the form of HALs or maybe the use of what they learned in that porting process to make more portable code in general. Would the change to this new Mac OS X architecture have been required-- and so delayed-- if the older codebase could actually have been recompiled more easily to run on 486, pentium, 68K, PPC601, then PII, PPC603/604, then PIII and the G4 stuff, and now Opteron, Itanium, and G5?
The comparison to Dell from a business perspective is difficult, since Dell innovated in product delivery, not product development (this was stated), but loss-of-hardware-control issues aside, Apple would not be a in a bad position if Dell could ship MacOS-86 machines to some percentage of their cutomers. The Mac back then had a great market presence (if not market share), Apple had prime brand recognition, and their customers would have appreciated being able to use their favorite software without having to convince their IT department to buy more expensive hardware.
I have to wonder if Apple and MacOS could have been doing back then what Linux and *BSD are doing now as far as "portable" software development. Remember, Windows 3.1 was big, but what if MacOS was running cross-platform when Windows95 had been released? MS makes a ton on Office anyway... probably could have witnessed MSOffice running on MacOS on an Itanium desktop machine, with Netscape Communicator in a window behind it.
A long time ago (25 years?) there was a company called ON TV in Phoenix that broadcast their pay signals over a normal UHF channel (channel 15 I think). They had a contract with the local indy station to take over their broadcasts from something like 7pm until some odd hour in the mornning.
In order to receive the channel content, you had to have/rent/purchase a decoder box that had nothing but a big knob on it that said-- wait for it-- Off and ON.
My grandmother had one. It worked well enough. Nothing special, really. But it was pay tv over a "free" broadcast channel. Everyone received it for free, but you had to pay to decode it.
Won't the true US high tech office of the future consist of a project manager's desk and a VoIP video phone that connects to the development team in India?
I mean the very near future.
A bit further down the roard the development team will be in Romania.
On the one hand, the article points out,
which is interesting, because casinos could always use the human-operated PTZ cameras that watch everything (even the players) on the gaming floor, and of course dealers and pit bosses are always on the lookout as well, but this does raise the bar into questionable territory if only because, like a red light camera, it is operating against you on its own and you really have nobody to "fight" if it decides you are nailed. Perhaps they might review the video of your 100 allegedly-counted hands?
However, if a system like this does roll out into real use, it should be presumed that every MIT kid on their counting team read this,
and is already scheming. I would be to, and I don't even count cards. It's as though Mr. Soltys is looking right at the reader while he says, "Bring it on!"
I knew a guy who counted cards and used chip-palming techniques to keep his chip count reasonable. Switch tables and even casinos frequently, be patient, and if possible play with a team. The camera system doesn't seem to have that stuff covered. I predict the primary way of catching rule-breakers will remain the old fashioned way... half instinct, half suspicious and watchful eye.
I'm guessing there are some legal strings attached, but I wonder whether a fully AOL-capable version of Mozilla, distrbuted almost like the original AOL virus itself (in this case, I would, for example, bring over an install CD to help my AOL-using parents to move beyond IE... even better if they could get around AOL 7.0 or whatever they're using). Yes, they can use whatever browser they want, but how about an email client that works?
Is there a legal barrier in place to prevent this, especially from former (and whoafully under appreciated) employees ? Since AOL never followed through while they were there, I think the only real justice at this point would be to let loose better, cross-platform software for the AOL userbase out there. Who knows, maybe some linux users will make the switch to AOL...
As an aside, a few troll comments here and there have suggested that now IE can be the one true client to create web content for... I give such commentary little credence, but is the SCO action on IBM (et al.) and the AOL action on Mozilla just bad timing, or is the fact that Microsoft money flows to both make any more interesting their coincidence?
Just a thought. Posted using Moz 1.4, by the way.
Maybe useful... if you check under "Multimedia Center" rather than "Graphic Driver" and then check "Linux" as the platform, drivers for the recent ATI offerings are listed, along with the familiar download page that I remember seeing a couple of months ago when I was looking for this stuff. This is visible here. It would appear that these point to the FireGL driver anyway, so all this does is offer some reassurance that recent cards are still listed with Linux drivers...
I don't actually have an ATI card at the moment, so YMV.
Recently there was an article posted here about taxes on cable modems here, but it occurs to me that spam, like postal junk mail, could help pay for infrastructure just as easily.
Not an original idea, but like a state sales tax (or one of several European VATs), the onus would be on the merchants, or in this case those relaying spam, to collect and pay up.
Now, since American companies are being required to collect and disperse VAT for sales made in Europe, surely there will be some sort of reciprocity there, and in general America (or the states therein) would impose sanctions on countries that did not abide by these new spam tax laws.
With spam in the news as much as it has been lately, surely some government types will take notice, that there is cash sitting in their inbox (or in their filtered spam folder if they're smart). And SpamAssassin catches a huge percentage of the spam I get lately, so if my mail machine has to do a little bit of filtering so that middle America can get cable modems and dsl, and so that maybe the last mile can be fiber someday, well, I'll bite the bullet, as long as I don't have to pay cable modem taxes or any other such things and get this spam.
'nuf said.
It is unfortunate that things have to go this way, but until this silliness is brought home-- literally-- the masses can't get behind any effort to put a stop to it.
Does the DMCA make life difficult or inconvenient for your family or non-technical friends? Probably not. Not in a way that they notice or associate with anything in particular. Not being able to rip music CDs may impact a reasonable chunk of the voting public, but no critical mass there.
Wait until your parents want to Tivo their favorite TV show or a movie on a premium station that they pay extra for, but they find out that not only can they not record that show or movie, but in fact the Tivo is not really functional at all anymore... and maybe their VCR doesn't record everything they want, either.
When voters are effected by this stuff, and when they are effected enough so that they get angry, matters like this will suddenly get the attention they deserve. So long as lobbyists and campaign contributors are the only ones making noise, there won't be anything reasonable coming out of our politicians.
At least FCC Chairman Michael Powell likes his Tivo, so maybe there will be some advocacy there. Maybe.
At first I was mildly intrigued by the look of the 3650, and since T-Mobile (my carrier in AZ) actually offers the phone directly, I did some looking around... bottom line, pass on it (IMHO).
Others have pointed out the flaky Nokia bluetooth stuff, and the lack of syncml might actually be a bigger minus that I would have thought initially (I have an Ericsson R520 with all sorts of features, syncml among them, and I am just now starting to exercise the phone's feature set).
The keypad has to go.
I usually stop by here to get some phone scoopage (there are certainly many, many other sites as well). They have a review of the 3650 at the bottom-- or use the review search feature-- with the final thoughts (on page 3 of the review) rather humorous, but probably too true to be ignored.
Also on that site I found a review of the Siemens S55 which made me want to read more about the current and upcoming Siemens offerings. On the same site yet again is an article covering just that topic, about the upcoming SX1 and others from Siemens. The SX1 looks like it takes alternative keypad design in a slightly more functional direction.
Having tried out the Jabra FreeSpeak with my R520 (successfully and satisfactorily), and with a need to use some WAP and other wireless networking features lately, I am utterly convinced that getting a phone that does what you want it to do-- well-- is essential. Look past the buzz, get what will meet your needs, and pay attention to those details about keypad quality, low-light screen readability, and other such mundane details.
But that SX1 still looks cool...
Take:
Empirically, 1000 pagers (at 3-4 dial sequences per minute) equals about 4 days of constant calls to the vicitim's phone. How I know this is another discussion...
Of course, this was more effective when digital pagers were much, much more popular. Today, it probably wouldn't go over as well, but back in the late 80s and early 90s, it worked flawlessly. Essentially, it was distributed crank calling before the "DDOS" term was coined.
The most interesting part was that the pager companies explicitly refused to do anything about it. No tracing of calls, no attempts to halt sequential dialing, etc. Not their problem.