For ridiculously reasonable fees, many telcos already offer unlimited monthly long-distance anywhere in the U.S.
For example, I have DSL and unlimited long distance service coming over the same phone wires in my home (SBC). Am I going to fire up the PC to call grandma, and suffer through the lousy audio quality? I think not. Why bother with VoIP when long distance is all-you-can-eat?
Granted, if I made a lot of long-distance calls overseas to people who didn't mind talking over crappy 1970's quality connections, then maybe I might use VoIP for a substantial savings. But that's not what the bulk of consumers are doing these days.
Seems to me that telcos are already realizing that unlimited packets is approximately equal to unlimited voice service. They are pricing unlimited voice to a very close price-point, and now only the hard-core would ever bother with VoIP.
I have no dispute with the university's prior claim.
But I have to wonder if they have been living under a rock... what took them so long to get vocal about this? RH's Fedora has been on the public radar for a long, long time now.
Interesting question! But there are empirical studies one can perform. Give me an uninterrupted 60 minutes alone with each of your wives and I'll give you a pretty good ballpark guestimate.:)
I don't really care if he's an editor or not, writing a "review" of Windows XP whose basic premise is "It's not like Linux, and all the Linux software I like is different on it" is drivel.
He just went from a manual stickshift to an automatic and is still expecting to control the shifting as usual. I'd call this stupid user behavior, except that I know he's not stupid. He's just trying to make a (redundant) point in a (troll) heavy-handed fashion. Which is fine I suppose, except that it seems a little beneath the editorial bar for the front page of Slashdot.
Sadly, there's no quantitative values for proposed reduced measures yet, but given the speed at which government moves it's reassuring to know the issue is this far along already.
Actually, government has begun to move quite remarkably quickly on certain issues which intersect in areas of technology and popular concern. (Do-Not Call List is a prime example, and this seems to follow suit.)
I'm no longer shocked when gov't actions take days or weeks instead of months or years.
If spam is illegal is certain jurisdictions, wouldn't sale of this book in those jurisdictions be akin to inciting criminal behavior? What would be the financial liabilities of this? (Obviously IANAL.)
They may very well have been representing their constituencies. Most of the reps on this list are Libertarians. In principle they object to the government intruding into business practices. This is just another form of said intrusion (albeit a popular one).
The neophyte PC user might get stymied by this, sure. But anyone with a reasonable grasp of their PC will get around this easily.
1) Don't allow CDs to automatically read or execute anything, ever.
2) How can data on a CD possibly be hidden without be completely incompatible with old CD players? Even if the CD isn't formatted for PC reading it will still contain the song data in audio CD format.
3) Is this even a new issue? I've seen CDs like this as long ago as 1999.
For something as complex as a desktop OS, it's virtually impossible to have "usability" without usage, and to-date this OS has no users to speak of.
Show me even a meager 500,000 users who consider the usability of this to be on par with WinXP or MacOSX and then you'll have a story. Otherwise this is just PRWire disguised as a lab study.
I'm a pilot. I have a cell phone. I have it set to vibrate while flying, so I can see who called (I call them back later).
I've never seen interference with my instruments from this or any other cell phone activity.
Doesn't mean it can't happen. Just means I haven't seen it.
Oh, and by the way, we are all trained to handle such interference interruptions, and it's really no big deal when/if they happen. The instruments that you really need for critical situations (i.e. final approach and landing in fog, by instruments) are fairly inured to electronic failure (barring loss of electricity).
Traditional telephony lets people talk at a great distance and travels over telco lines. And gets taxed.
VoIP lets people talk at a great distance and travels over telco lines. And does not get taxed.
What is the difference? A matter of what the encoder/decoders look like? A matter of historical roots of VoIP emerging from a (presumed) free technology?
I want free phone calls as much as the next guy, but I'm not sure I understand why VoIP is so different from traditional phone calls. (Or for that matter, why email and AIM are not subject to taxation too, since they also travel over the same telco system, but even mentioning this greatly increases my troll-likelihood.)
I bought this book, thinking that if it is anywhere near as useful as the Perl Cookbook, then I would be getting my US $39.95 worth. I was very disappointed with the book and would not recommend it to JavaScript/DHTML experts.
The problem with this book is that is almost completely tailored to the person who hasn't much experience with these technologies. For example, the section on the String object gives newbie tips like:
Use += to concatenate strings.
(Whoo-hoo! Thank you Danny Goodman, where can I mail my check to?)
In this very same section on String concatenation it completely fails to discuss the geometric performance loss experienced as strings become larger and larger. Why wouldn't you discuss this? What I would expect to see is a discussion of how you can implement your own version of a StringBuffer, similar to Java, by using Array operators.
There is almost no discussion of client-side XML, absolutely nothing on XSL. If you do much dynamic in-place refresh of data or styles, this book will not help you much.
The book might be fine for novices and maybe even intermediate developers, but for experts it falls very flat. I skim the book once a week or so hoping to glean something new, and I'm always disappointed. Caveat Emptor.
If you are a serious developer you should probably just have your employer buy you a subscription to the O'Reilly Safari online bookshelf, and then you can see for yourself whether or not this book is any help to you.
(BTW, for those have said that you cannot get work as a DHTML programmer, you are so wrong. I make a comfortable six-figure salary doing this work for governments and large corporations. If you are good enough at what you do you can always find someone willing to pay you for it, and DHTML is no exception.)
Microsoft should instead be focusing completely on security, performance, interoperability, stability, and flexibility - you know, all of the things that are allowing Linux to kill Microsoft on the server side.
Who says they aren't? UI design and security are not mutually exclusive.
These are leaked screenshots, not final feature checklists. You are grinding your axe at the wrong moment, pal.
And what is wrong with eliminating all the horrible jobs that people only take because there is nothing else?
Seriously, if those jobs were gone then the people who work them would need other jobs. Hopefully better jobs. If 50% of jobs are taken by robots in 2050, then that either means that a) a lot of us do not have to work, b) unemployment is ridiculously high, c) the human race has been decimated and unemployment is about what it is now, or d) the economic landscape looks so much different than it does today that it's ok that the shitty jobs are gone.
You might think this is awful, but when I was scammed by someone on eBay, it sure was convenient to have them turn over all their relevant information to the Austin, TX police department so I could get my money back.
Sometimes criminals deserve to be treated like... criminals. Try to see both sides of the coin here.
I like Ms. Ullman's writing, but...
on
The Bug
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
I don't think (from reading this book) that she's quite made the leap to writing fiction. The characters were wooden and stereotyped, the problems with "the code" overly dramatic and in the end sorta phony, and the plot was a stretch at best. She was trying to create a tension where none really exists naturally. (A Bug? Big deal, fix it. I do that 20 times a week or more.)
I hope she continues to work on her fiction, because given how talented she is at expository prose and given her deep understanding of the geek existence, she has real potential. (Close to the Machine was excellent!) But for now I would much rather read a writer who learns geek (c.f. Neal Stephenson, William Gibson) than a geek who learns to write fiction. YMMV.
Slashdot Mirror
For ridiculously reasonable fees, many telcos already offer unlimited monthly long-distance anywhere in the U.S.
For example, I have DSL and unlimited long distance service coming over the same phone wires in my home (SBC). Am I going to fire up the PC to call grandma, and suffer through the lousy audio quality? I think not. Why bother with VoIP when long distance is all-you-can-eat?
Granted, if I made a lot of long-distance calls overseas to people who didn't mind talking over crappy 1970's quality connections, then maybe I might use VoIP for a substantial savings. But that's not what the bulk of consumers are doing these days.
Seems to me that telcos are already realizing that unlimited packets is approximately equal to unlimited voice service. They are pricing unlimited voice to a very close price-point, and now only the hard-core would ever bother with VoIP.
This entire thread is the best (or worst, YMMV) Linux dis ever.
The fact that somebody must ask Slashdot if there are any games that their office can play on decent hardware is, um how shall we say it, ouchie.
Ya, ya, troll post. Don't bother flaming, I run Linux too.
Bay Area here too. :)
Not all students who attend MIT are Americans; many are from India.
Many Indians might think this outsourcing is a good thing, not a bad thing.
Some MIT graduates return to India to work for Sapient and Microsoft.
Sapient and Microsoft are global organizations. MIT is an American institution which educates global students and works with global corporations.
Phil Greenspun might be outraged (and then again he might not be, his blog doesn't lean either way). I am not.
These bastards emailed everyone in my contacts to spam them about joining their service. They neither asked me nor told me.
Not just uncool, but lame and unprofessional, and in some cases this was more than a little embarassing.
I have no dispute with the university's prior claim.
But I have to wonder if they have been living under a rock... what took them so long to get vocal about this? RH's Fedora has been on the public radar for a long, long time now.
How do you tell which one of us has "more" love?
Interesting question! But there are empirical studies one can perform. Give me an uninterrupted 60 minutes alone with each of your wives and I'll give you a pretty good ballpark guestimate. :)
What, no Ctrl-C and Ctrl-V??
*ducks*
I don't really care if he's an editor or not, writing a "review" of Windows XP whose basic premise is "It's not like Linux, and all the Linux software I like is different on it" is drivel.
He just went from a manual stickshift to an automatic and is still expecting to control the shifting as usual. I'd call this stupid user behavior, except that I know he's not stupid. He's just trying to make a (redundant) point in a (troll) heavy-handed fashion. Which is fine I suppose, except that it seems a little beneath the editorial bar for the front page of Slashdot.
Sadly, there's no quantitative values for proposed reduced measures yet, but given the speed at which government moves it's reassuring to know the issue is this far along already.
Actually, government has begun to move quite remarkably quickly on certain issues which intersect in areas of technology and popular concern. (Do-Not Call List is a prime example, and this seems to follow suit.)
I'm no longer shocked when gov't actions take days or weeks instead of months or years.
If spam is illegal is certain jurisdictions, wouldn't sale of this book in those jurisdictions be akin to inciting criminal behavior? What would be the financial liabilities of this? (Obviously IANAL.)
They may very well have been representing their constituencies. Most of the reps on this list are Libertarians. In principle they object to the government intruding into business practices. This is just another form of said intrusion (albeit a popular one).
The neophyte PC user might get stymied by this, sure. But anyone with a reasonable grasp of their PC will get around this easily.
1) Don't allow CDs to automatically read or execute anything, ever.
2) How can data on a CD possibly be hidden without be completely incompatible with old CD players? Even if the CD isn't formatted for PC reading it will still contain the song data in audio CD format.
3) Is this even a new issue? I've seen CDs like this as long ago as 1999.
For something as complex as a desktop OS, it's virtually impossible to have "usability" without usage, and to-date this OS has no users to speak of.
Show me even a meager 500,000 users who consider the usability of this to be on par with WinXP or MacOSX and then you'll have a story. Otherwise this is just PRWire disguised as a lab study.
I'm a pilot. I have a cell phone. I have it set to vibrate while flying, so I can see who called (I call them back later).
I've never seen interference with my instruments from this or any other cell phone activity.
Doesn't mean it can't happen. Just means I haven't seen it.
Oh, and by the way, we are all trained to handle such interference interruptions, and it's really no big deal when/if they happen. The instruments that you really need for critical situations (i.e. final approach and landing in fog, by instruments) are fairly inured to electronic failure (barring loss of electricity).
...can someone perhaps explain?
Traditional telephony lets people talk at a great distance and travels over telco lines. And gets taxed.
VoIP lets people talk at a great distance and travels over telco lines. And does not get taxed.
What is the difference? A matter of what the encoder/decoders look like? A matter of historical roots of VoIP emerging from a (presumed) free technology?
I want free phone calls as much as the next guy, but I'm not sure I understand why VoIP is so different from traditional phone calls. (Or for that matter, why email and AIM are not subject to taxation too, since they also travel over the same telco system, but even mentioning this greatly increases my troll-likelihood.)
Hey, if he's up all night reading /. he may yet beat the feds and run to Canada ;^)
If he's smart, he'll drive. It's way faster....
That's an interesting way of doing it. Keeping an in-store database of what hasn't been sold, rather than a database of what has been sold.
Um, that's called inventory. :)
Nothing new here, move along....
This entire sub-thread of I-hate's can be paraphrased as "I hate it because it's different from what I use every day."
...which says more about the poster than the language being discussed.
I bought this book, thinking that if it is anywhere near as useful as the Perl Cookbook, then I would be getting my US $39.95 worth. I was very disappointed with the book and would not recommend it to JavaScript/DHTML experts.
The problem with this book is that is almost completely tailored to the person who hasn't much experience with these technologies. For example, the section on the String object gives newbie tips like:
(Whoo-hoo! Thank you Danny Goodman, where can I mail my check to?)
In this very same section on String concatenation it completely fails to discuss the geometric performance loss experienced as strings become larger and larger. Why wouldn't you discuss this? What I would expect to see is a discussion of how you can implement your own version of a StringBuffer, similar to Java, by using Array operators.
There is almost no discussion of client-side XML, absolutely nothing on XSL. If you do much dynamic in-place refresh of data or styles, this book will not help you much.
The book might be fine for novices and maybe even intermediate developers, but for experts it falls very flat. I skim the book once a week or so hoping to glean something new, and I'm always disappointed. Caveat Emptor.
If you are a serious developer you should probably just have your employer buy you a subscription to the O'Reilly Safari online bookshelf, and then you can see for yourself whether or not this book is any help to you.
(BTW, for those have said that you cannot get work as a DHTML programmer, you are so wrong. I make a comfortable six-figure salary doing this work for governments and large corporations. If you are good enough at what you do you can always find someone willing to pay you for it, and DHTML is no exception.)
Who says they aren't? UI design and security are not mutually exclusive.
These are leaked screenshots, not final feature checklists. You are grinding your axe at the wrong moment, pal.
And what is wrong with eliminating all the horrible jobs that people only take because there is nothing else?
Seriously, if those jobs were gone then the people who work them would need other jobs. Hopefully better jobs. If 50% of jobs are taken by robots in 2050, then that either means that a) a lot of us do not have to work, b) unemployment is ridiculously high, c) the human race has been decimated and unemployment is about what it is now, or d) the economic landscape looks so much different than it does today that it's ok that the shitty jobs are gone.
You might think this is awful, but when I was scammed by someone on eBay, it sure was convenient to have them turn over all their relevant information to the Austin, TX police department so I could get my money back.
Sometimes criminals deserve to be treated like... criminals. Try to see both sides of the coin here.
I don't think (from reading this book) that she's quite made the leap to writing fiction. The characters were wooden and stereotyped, the problems with "the code" overly dramatic and in the end sorta phony, and the plot was a stretch at best. She was trying to create a tension where none really exists naturally. (A Bug? Big deal, fix it. I do that 20 times a week or more.)
I hope she continues to work on her fiction, because given how talented she is at expository prose and given her deep understanding of the geek existence, she has real potential. (Close to the Machine was excellent!) But for now I would much rather read a writer who learns geek (c.f. Neal Stephenson, William Gibson) than a geek who learns to write fiction. YMMV.