Banks require your social security number for tax reporting purposes.
You have a point there and I am not sure how she deals with banks; maybe she keeps all her money in Canadian banks.
Also, there are lots of foreign people in the U.S. and elsewhere who have U.S. bank accounts but no SS #. I suspect that banks assign these people arbitrary generated numbers. Perhaps you can go to a bank, tell them you're from Scotland or Uruguay or the South Pole and just open an account without the damn SS number. Of course they may demand a passport.
Now here's an interesting bit of trivia. You can change your social security number. It's free and you have to apply, with proof of identity, and also supply a reason why the change is needed. It can be a change of name, threat of domestic violence, identity theft, or even because the numbers are offensive to your religious beliefs. I suppose the latter reason is the best way to change your SS # arbitrarily. However, they say they keep your old number on file and cross referenced, so it may be that someone with your old number could still cause you grief.
The thing that bothers me is that some data is unchangeable, e.g. US social security #, date of birth, and mother's maiden name. Once it's out there, you're screwed.
Once someone has this data they can really do a number on you because that's all most commercial sites seem to require in terms of validation. They can take out credit cards in your name, perhaps even access your bank account if they have access to your checking account number.
I think that eventually, and unfortunately, there's gonna have to be a law. No organization except the social security administration should be allowed to store our SS #, for example. Heck, at the rate things are going, they may have to start allowing people to change their SS # to start fresh.
A friend never allows her SS # to be used for anything. Not banks, not schools, not health insurance. They squawk and scream and threaten and she stands firm. No, she says, you can't have it. It's only for her retirement, not for generic identification purposes. So far she has successfully evaded spreading her most precious identifying information all over the internet in god knows how many incompetently coded and poorly safeguarded databases. Massachusetts also allows one to use a generated code instead of SS # on drivers licenses.
This thing is really out of hand. Of course, it's going to cost credit card companies millions of dollars when bogus bills start bouncing, and that's probably when the powers that be finally wake up and address the problem.
Yeah, I find ask slashdot useful too. When you filter out the "Why didn't you just google it, moron?" type comments and the "why would you want to do that anyway" trolls, you sometimes get some useful information and discussion regarding the various ways to solve the O.P.'s problem.
I see Ask Slashdot not as a substitute for a simple keyword search but rather a supplemental verification process. I have found that keyword searches don't necessarily reveal best practices; you get unedited, unrefuted claims that you have to sift through. In a reasonably informed techie discussion forum like Slashdot (sometimes), you can get some interesting debate and comparisons on various approaches and methodologies.
And, as you noted, it's a way to be exposed to problems which I don't currently have but might someday. Then when I encounter the problem, I hope a little fragment of memory in my aging brain will bubble to the surface to remind me that it's been discussed on Slashdot.
For researching technical problems, the best thing is to combine Google, Slashdot, Usenet newsgroups, and specialty forums such as (in the O.P.'s case) webhostingtalk.com, spend a little time in each place and take notes. From amongst voluminous chaff generally there's a bit of wheat to be harvested.;-)
At the risk of belaboring the obvious, it should also be noted that the way to put useful information out there in the first place so that googlers can find it is precisely this sort of forum. Google is only your friend if there's something out there worth searching for.
I'd love to switch to Speakeasy; I like their TOS and I want the fixed IP addresses. However, $49.95 for 1.5M/256K/dialup does not compare favorably with Verizon's $45 for $1.5M/384K/dialup that I currently buy. Furthermore, for an additional $10 Verizon will bump the d/l speed to 3M. In terms of bandwidth, Speakeasy is no longer competitive with Verizon in eastern Massachusetts at least.
I have asked Speakeasy to address the bandwidth question but they have not responded as yet. They say you get better tech support with them, which is great, but the bandwidth is a 24/7 experience while the support is a rare experience even with Verizon. Granted Verizon support is poor but it's just not on the front burner.
Someone, set me straight on this. I'd be happy to switch to the "good guys" if given enough reasons.
If you get no response using your real name (presumably you have a non-Anglo Saxon or non-Indian surname), yet you get an immediate responses when you use English or Indian names, then you should immediately inundate them with thousands of variants of the successful name, all with identical or nearly-identical cv.
For example, if Rodion Romanovich Raskolnikov does not work but Hubert Penniweather does, then generate hundreds of "similar" names such as Hughie, Huguenot, Huffy, etc. Their personnel people will be so busy sending responses to these politically correct applicants that the company will implode.
Yeah, it's true that there's a lot of cloning and ripping off of established Western brands and a general disregard for intellectual property rights going on in east Asia, but in this instance I think the Chinese companies have a point.
They're claiming a patent cost of $20 per player. Think about it; it probably costs no more than $20 to make the damn things and who knows how much cheaper they'll get as they become totally commoditized. It's ridiculous. Pretty soon the majority cost of a computer system is going to be the IP tax. I say bring on the lawsuits and break this price fixing cartel.
Better yet, bring on the blue-ray 50G disks and let's just get past this mediocre, DRM-encumbered DVD mess.
This is just my personal experience, but I haven't found Firefox to be all that slick and streamlined as compared to Mozilla or anything else. Furthermore, it's rather unstable even in its 1.0 version and seems to crash arbitrarily under certain circumstances, in my case a couple of times a day.
Firefox takes about 10-12 seconds to load on a 900 Mh PIII system running a 2.6.x linux kernel, which is just long enough for me to start drumming my fingers impatiently. I tend to keep it in memory just so I won't have to wait for it to start up, which I don't like to do because it seems to become unstable after a while.
Firefox doesn't always render pages consistently; for example, quite often it messes up the Slashdot home page and I have to reload the page to view it properly. I wonder why this is.
I do appreciate the growing number of extensions for Firefox, though I wonder why they can't have been adapted for Mozilla since it also uses XUL. I currently use Image Zoom, Advanced Highlighter Button, User Agent Switcher, Web Developer, All-in-One Gestures, Nuke Anything, Print It, and Flashblock, and with these fine enhancements I have taken back control of my browsing experience. No more in-your-face flash explosions, a really well done mouse gestures tool, and the ability to zoom images or even remove them from the page. This has made browsing fun again!
I miss the stability and "solid feel" of Mozilla but I like some of the little GUI doo-dads that Firefox has and I'm looking forward to lots more innovations from these folks. I also like the fact that the world is finally writing web pages for multiple browsers again after a very dark period from 1999-2002 when IE reigned.
I concur; the T5 was a big disappointment. I was looking for an excuse to upgrade my Tungsten T but will just have to keep on waiting.
I use the voice recorder every day and can't live without it. If I "upgraded" to the T5, I'd have to buy a digital recorder to carry around. No way.
Every time I record something using the voice recorder, people are amazed: "You mean that thing records too? Where can I get one?" The "wow" factor is there and Palm has thrown it out with the bath water.
Furthermore, my T|T functions as a handy guitar tuner, which I assume the T5 can't do because it lacks a microphone.
I have a couple of 512MB flash cards so the T5's built-in flash RAM does nothing for me. The non-volatile memory feature is nice, but my T|T runs Backup Man every day at 2AM and that pretty much covers it.
Wifi is the killer feature for which I'd upgrade, but the T5 doesn't have it; I'd have to spend an additional $100 and give up my SD slot.
Now turning to the Treo 650, I continue to be disappointed. OK, so Walt Mossberg of the Wall Street Journal has endorsed it, so it's guaranteed to be a prestige purchase among executives.
If the Treo had built-in wifi and (enabled) DUN via bluetooth and maybe a few more megs of RAM then I'd be all over that puppy. However it feels like almost a downgrade from T|T and my trusty Startac phone and modem card.
Palm, let's see a Treo with the features of T3, wifi, bluetooth, voice recorder, nothing crippled, and you will have the killer app of 2005. The fact that a hacker had to add back in the obvious necessary features tells you that something's totally wrong with Palm marketing.
The good news is that Palm's moving to Linux as the base OS, so maybe future hacks (a.k.a. community contributions) will be easier and more common. Too little too late perhaps but time will tell.
The official explanation is that the voltage capacity of Tungsten T and T2 models is not high enough to support a wifi card. Sandisk also developed a wifi SD card but they, too, only support the high end models. Maybe later this year PalmOne will smarten up and release a T6 with built-in wifi and microphone, the way Nature intended it to be.;-)
If you are job hunting, try applying to companies run by people with doctorates; they seem more likely to hire based on that degree, since they understand the pain and effort it takes to get one. I have been at a couple of start-ups with PhDs in prominent positions, and they were respectful and gave large consideration to applicants with similar academic accomplishments.
It's not to say that you need any sort of degree at all to succeed in the IT field; indeed, some of the best programmers I have ever met scarcely possessed a high school diploma. I'm just recommending this strategy because people have a natural tendency to hire their own.
"Real" Americans are those that were born here or lived most of their life here.
Says you. I guess "real" is a state of mind. Newly arrived immigrants have been mistreated here for centuries, and yet they stayed and helped to build a great nation.
Many of the eastern European immigrants who arrived during the previous great wave of immigration (1879-1929) had no intention of staying; they planned to find jobs, make a pile of money, and take it home with them. However, as with most of the best laid plans, things did not turn out as they expected. Young and energetic and hard working, they found jobs, settled down, raised families, and suddenly the option of going back home simply didn't exist anymore.
I think people should be encouraged to come work here because such folk tend to have a higher average level of energy and diligence, and their children are more likely to go on to university and continue their parents' high level of contributions to the economy. It simply makes good sense to welcome them with open arms. Telling them they're not welcome unless they intend to stay seems a bit contradictory.
In Palm Quick Install.. Click on "Add" then select files of type "All Files (*.*)".
And this accomplishes what, exactly? The Palm OS does not allow hot syncing of files that are not associated with specific applications. Or did you mean "You should be able to add arbitrary files but can't, currently."?
Yes, an SD card drive lets you carry "arbitrary" files around but they cannot be directly used by the Palm unless they are converted to a Palm compatible format.
Documents 2 Go can handle text files...
Not last I checked. I contacted Dataviz a year or so ago to inquire about handling native text files and they confirmed that their application does not do this. It can, however, handle native Microsoft Office files such as Word and Excel, if that floats your boat.
You state correctly that Palm Desktop (or JPilot for us Linux users) allows cut and pasting into Memo fields (also note fields in Address Book). This is all good.
But it would be nice to be able to throw a bunch of text files, HTML, XML, whatever, on a memory card and then view them on the Palm without any PC-based importation or conversion steps. I'm really surprised that no one's done a text file viewer and thrown it onto Sourceforge.net yet (yeah yeah, if I had the time....).
Also really nice would be a (native file format) OpenOffice.org viewer/editor app for PalmOS. To my knowledge (please tell me I'm wrong) there's no such beast as of yet. It's highly unlikely that Dataviz or QuickOffice is going to implement this any time soon, though of course you can always export your OOo documents as Word format, then use them on the Palm--I've done this numerous times but it's not as convenient.
It's surprising, or maybe not actually, that articles such as the Houston Chronicle piece referenced by the OP completely ignore the most obvious approaches to "green" energy use. Insulation of every building, passive solar heating and electricity generation on every rooftop where it's feasible, more public transportation, and a crash program to incentivize use of fuel efficient cars would go a long way to mitigate if not solve the energy problem. It's not sexy but it works.
Up front costs may be higher for solar and other alternative and supplemental systems, but long term the payoff is there. You have to be willing to wait 10-15 years for your solar power array to pay for itself and then some.
Americans have a centralized power mindset; it's difficult to imagine a power plant on every block, or solar and fuel cells in every house. Yet, that's much more in keeping with the American tradition of pioneer self-reliance.
I searched for "tiananmen massacre". Amazingly, a few sites actually came up that mention the 1989 shootings of students in Tiananmen Square, but the top 10 also includes Texas chainsaw massacre and a few other irrelevancies. There were almost no major news sites in the search results.
Conversely, Google returns a lot more relevant hits on this subject many of which are major, reputable news sites with "Tiananmen Massacre" shown prominently in the summaries.
I would say, stick to Google.
It figures that Bill Clinton would endorse this crummy Google wannabe. Whatever one may think of Clinton, his China policy was rather undistinguished and ineffectual.
You, my friend, are a sucker in every aspect of the word. You bought a phone because of all the gimmicks without actually making sure it was adequate as a phone.
Strong words there, fella. How is he a sucker merely for buying a highly recommended product and then trying to get some problems fixed?
I'm very interested in the Treo 650 and I really appreciate users like him airing possible problems with the product and looking for solutions that will keep him from returning it.
My guess (and hope) is that it's a software problem that can be fixed with a flash rom upgrade or some such.
The Treo 650's not that bad a product. I haven't heard any complaints about the Treo as pda; it's got a really nice screen and all the usual Palm apps. The camera is OK, the bluetooth is nice except that Sprint disabled dial-up networking (they promise to enable it in a future software upgrade), and Palm's giving out free 128MB SD cards to its customers as a temporary fix for the memory problem.
I'm waiting for T-Mobile and Verizon to start offering it, so I can choose between the competition for my next contract. But I'd prefer a Treo 700 that included wifi and a little more memory.
This is a question of where does the buck stop--with the probable perpetrators or incompetents who caused the accident, or with the regional VP, or with Indian government officials who exacerbated the problems, or with the president and chairman of the U.S. company that owned the plant. It's really not all that clear.
The Union Carbide Bhopal plant was operated and managed by Indians; it was an all-Indian staff. When the incident occurred that released toxic fumes, there were thousands of people living right outside the fences of the facility in shanty towns. It was not the smartest idea to live next to a chemical plant in the first place, but the Indians were lackadaisical about such things. After the incident, it was reported that the plant staff were dispersed to other parts of India and were mysteriously unavailable for questioning by the Americans. What's more, the whole incident was immediately blamed on the Americans by a hostile Indian government intent on scapegoating the U.S. and collecting billions of dollars in damages.
Recall that at this time India was the leader of the "unaligned movement", a group of nations which played the U.S. off against the U.S.S.R. Indira Gandhi was quite anti-American and India was very restrictive about foreign investments. Consequently poverty endured there until very recently, when the information revolution finally cracked their shell open.
Yes, Bhopal was a terrible tragedy, but the Indian government deserves some of the blame for their craven role as an exploiter of the disaster for political purposes.
it would allow IBM to further distance itself from Microsoft and Intel.
I don't quite follow your logic here. The manufacturer has the most control over the product. If IBM wanted to, they could manufacture desktops and laptops that conformed closely to Linux specifications and the heck with what Microsoft wants. They could make Linux their internal corporate standard, roll it out to 100,000 workers, and promote it heavily to their partners. This might cost them a couple billion dollars but that's a drop in the bucket for them and would do more to annoy Microsoft than simply ceding the PC business to some Chinese manufacturer.
I believe that in fact IBM is just doing what they have always done; when a market is no longer highly profitable, they get out. GE is similar; they are one of the most profitable corporations in the world, and they are quick to jettison a business if its margins are not acceptable.
Probably, the C-level soothsayers at Big Blue are looking down the line a few years and predicting that PC and laptop technology is going to continue trending toward a cheap Asian-built commodity to the point where all the profits will be on the service and support side. This is just a continuation of their move toward a service and support organization. Let others sweat the manufacturing and razor-thin profit margins while IBM reaps the fat rewards of being the world's premier technology services company.
That said, I too mourn the passing of the excellent Thinkpads, but we'll all get over it. Buying a Dell every 18 months and staying on the leading edge is better than buying a Thinkpad every three years.
I'm thinking of upgrading my Palm Tungsten T to a Treo 650 (or its successor), to get rid of my Motorola Startac. Can the Treo get my laptop online via Bluetooth and DUN?
Currently, I do dial-up networking on my laptop using my Startac and an Ositech card but it's relatively slow--19.2kbps. I have a Verizon ISP dial-up account for $10/month, just a supplement to DSL for travel purposes or when DSL is down. If the Treo can replace this Ositech/Startac system, then it sounds like a great solution, but only if I don't need to hack my Treo to get DUN working!
Undoubtedly Gates is just like thousands of other executives; he has assistants who read his email for him. An executive of a company as large and powerful as Microsoft hardly would have time to read and respond to the typical 300-500 emails one gets in a day, let alone the thousands or millions he gets from being famous. I feel sorry for the guy, in a way; he used to be a computer geek just like so many others and he's cut off from part of the internet just by virtue of his success.
It does sound like an excellent opportunity to leverage some of that computer brainpower they have and create some first class spam filtering technology. With a test base of 4 million spams a day they have all the sample data they will ever need.
Yes, that's what the FA says. The problem is that it is a poor basis for raising revenue that perpetuates unfairness. (That's leaving aside the enforceability issues and the simple cost of installing this monstrosity.)
Consider, for example, how some municipalities make millions of dollars a year from parking fines. In Boston, that's traditionally been a major revenue source, and meter cops were encouraged by quotas to overinterpret the law and nail people who were 12 inches out of compliance with distance to the curb, or 1 minute overdue on their meter, etc. (This only began to subside a bit in the late 1980s after the infamous case of a driver in Boston who pulled over, fell out of his car, and lay on the sidewalk having a heart attack; as you can guess, a traffic cop proceeded to ticket his car WHILE HE WAS LYING THERE and the whole sorry scene was captured in a photograph for the Boston Globe's front page.)
Anyway, just because cities and towns develop a dependency on this form of revenue does not mean it is a fair or proper way to raise money. In fact, it encourages people to have contempt for the law and for the law to have contempt for people. Stupid, stupid.
We already pay an enormous amount of taxes to keep our cars on the road. Initial sales tax (in most states), annual excise tax based on the value of the car, automobile insurance which is highly regulated and taxed in most states, gasoline sales tax, tolls, license plate renewal fee, drivers license renewal fee, and speeding and parking fines. No doubt I'm forgetting a few things. Ted Kennedy's luxury tax if your car is > $100K?
I believe that gasoline actually should be taxed much more than it is. Go ahead, California; raise the gas tax to $1 a gallon. It's regressive taxation, admittedly, especially for contractors who have to drive vans and pickup trucks and the like, but overall it will help spur the adoption of alternative fuels such as corn-based methanol and coal- or solar-based hydrogen, which will be tremendously beneficial long term. And dare one mention public transportation? Cities without practical bus and subway systems--well, the voters should face the music and ante up for these programs, because as the boomer population ages it's going to become ever more important. Twenty years from now there are going to be about 90 million 75-year-olds out there driving; look out, world.
I used to use Opera; I paid for the full edition, and enjoyed its many innovative features such as tabs, convenient keyboard shortcuts for things like turning off image display, nice bookmark management, excellent mouse gestures, save-and-restore session, and on and on. At one time, it was the best browser by far for Linux, and it was an appealing alternative to IE on Windows. They really had the UI aspects down pat.
However, it crashed about once a day on my Redhat workstation and no amount of back and forth with tech support could uncover the problem.
Meanwhile, Mozilla appeared on the scene and got better and better. I would say that today, the Mozilla/Firefox family surpasses Opera in enough ways that Opera doesn't really have a niche like it used to.
I still like some of Opera's UI aspects best, but good old Moz is so stable now that it's a toss-up. Firefox has finally stabilized to where it doesn't crash on me 2-3 times a session, and I'm evaluating it as a replacement for Mozilla. Its font handling seems not as good as Mozilla though. I do dearly miss Opera's style sheet extension that lets you force word wrap on any web page with a simple keystroke.
One thing about Opera that bothered me was that they had a cut-off for owners of the previous version; you had to pay to upgrade. At that I drew the line and see no reason to put any more $ into that product, though I still appreciate their alternativeness and wish them well in their fight against the Microsoft titan.
Has anyone created a Linux distro especially for audio applications? It seems as though there are thousands of people out there who need it, and it takes an inordinate amount of effort to get the general Linux distribution to do audio properly.
I just upgraded my Redhat 8 system to Fedora Core 2 to take advantage of lots of security fixes. The old system used OSS for audio and while it wasn't perfect and lots of apps (Rosegarden, e.g.) don't use OSS, most things worked. Now I'm struggling with getting alsa to work properly with things like mplayer and Crossover. I can't record from the audio input, I can't watch AVI or MPEG videos, Microsoft Media Player under Crossover has no sound, and the docs and FAQs are of little help. OSS Emulation doesn't seem to work all that well unless I've got something really basic set up wrong.
If someone out there were to take Fedora and smooth out the audio stuff so that musicians and music fans could just install it and run with it, it would be a tremendous help. I guess it's time to put in some suggestions at fedora.redhat.com and hope they can devote some time to this soon.
In the meantime, my audio recording work happens on my Compaq laptop running Windows 2K Pro, Adobe Audition, and USB MIDI Man:(
Newer Palms (OS 5) can multitask, at least as far as playing MP3 goes. For example, if you fire up the bundled RealPlayer to listen to playlists of MP3s, you can immediately change to another app and the playback continues in the background.
Wifi is a neat thing but Palm has been behind on this for a long time. They only recently released a wifi SD card, but it's only compatible with a few models (T2, T3, T5, Zire 72) because of design issues in older Palm SD slots:(
"Relatively cheaply" applies much more to a Palm Zire than it does to the iPaq and Axim that you cited. These latter two are excellent handhelds, but the Zire has such a low cost of entry as to be practically an impulse purchase for non-corporate users.
Palm did one thing right in recent years and that was to purchase Handspring to get a hold of the Treo line. The Treo is consistently rated the best of the hybrid phone/PDA's by influential writers like the WSJ's Walt Mossberg, though it is not without its flaws. If Palm continues to improve the Treo in ways that the consumer finds compelling, they may well survive as a niche player. It's hard to see anyone surviving as a pure play PDA maker in the next five years.
Regarding Documents-to-Go, I just save my OpenOffice documents in Microsoft format and copy them to the Palm (Tungsten T in my case). Usually in fact I just dump documents on the memory card. This works pretty well. Actually I use QuickOffice these days but same thing.
Still, it would have been really, really nice of Palm to officially support Linux. I can actually run Palm Desktop under Crossover Wine, but of course Hotsync doesn't work and that kills it right there. JPilot's fine but I do miss the slickness of the Palm Desktop.
My main gripe regarding document reading and editing on the Palm is the compressed format most apps insist on. In an age of 512MB memory cards for $30 and 16-64MB main memory, I would rather just use standard plain text files, and dispense with this converting to pdb. Even Adobe Acrobat Reader for the Palm requires you to run your pdfs through this annoying Windows converter before it can read them.
I'm with you on the poor support for wi-fi. PalmOne provided an SD/MMC slot on the Tungsten T but didn't give it enough voltage to run a wifi card. The T3 slot works, so yeah maybe I'll get one someday. But then, they came out with the T5 and they don't include built-in wifi, hoping we'll all spring for the extra cost card. Had they included wifi, and had they not removed the microphone/voice recorder circuitry, and maybe thrown in the Zire camera, I'd call it the best handheld on the market. As it is, the T3 is a better product. Stupid Palm, they've blown it again. I love the voice recorder. I record lectures, concerts, and quick memos every day, and I have a digital guitar tuner app that works great. Everyone I show it to is blown away--"You mean that thing can record, too?" Besides, don't Pocket PCs have microphones?
The bottom line is that PalmOne these days is run by bean counters. At least their dim simian consciousnesses perceived a winner in the Treo so they bought Handspring, but now watch them kill it with their 80-20 rule: we only need to please 80% of the market, the 20% who demand those extra features aren't worth it. They totally failed to support Linux, and their Macintosh support is lackluster, even though Palm's primary software adversary is Microsoft. Too bad, Palm; I'm gonna miss you. It was fun while it lasted!
Agreed, what's all the fuss about? These aren't autonomous robots; they're just mechanical extensions of a human being who is operating them from safe inside a bunker or a tank.
Iraq seems like the perfect place to test and perfect this technology. Build a couple thousand of these drones, fit them with rapid fire guns, tear gas, and some nasty explosives in case they become disabled inside enemy territory or just for a little "suicide" mission here and there. Send'em rolling into some of these God-forsaken places like Sammara and Fallujah and let THEM take the bullets.
I don't want to any more Americans hurt. These insurgents, though, the ones who do the beheading and the blowing up of Iraqi children and women and unarmed Iraqi Guard trainees. Waste'em. Use them as target practice. Make them afraid to go to the potty, with our robots crawling all the hell over the place.
In fact this would be a profitable venture if the Pentagon ever thought of it that way. They could sell control of some of the pacbots to any citizen. Get six hours of mayhem for only $150!!! You will remotely control a pacbot from the safety of your living room; all you need is a modern browser. Joystick recommended. You will get an online scorecard, nickname, and chatboard to compare your hits with those of your friends. A true people's war!
Slashdot Mirror
Also, there are lots of foreign people in the U.S. and elsewhere who have U.S. bank accounts but no SS #. I suspect that banks assign these people arbitrary generated numbers. Perhaps you can go to a bank, tell them you're from Scotland or Uruguay or the South Pole and just open an account without the damn SS number. Of course they may demand a passport.
Now here's an interesting bit of trivia. You can change your social security number. It's free and you have to apply, with proof of identity, and also supply a reason why the change is needed. It can be a change of name, threat of domestic violence, identity theft, or even because the numbers are offensive to your religious beliefs. I suppose the latter reason is the best way to change your SS # arbitrarily. However, they say they keep your old number on file and cross referenced, so it may be that someone with your old number could still cause you grief.
This is really scary.
The thing that bothers me is that some data is unchangeable, e.g. US social security #, date of birth, and mother's maiden name. Once it's out there, you're screwed.
Once someone has this data they can really do a number on you because that's all most commercial sites seem to require in terms of validation. They can take out credit cards in your name, perhaps even access your bank account if they have access to your checking account number.
I think that eventually, and unfortunately, there's gonna have to be a law. No organization except the social security administration should be allowed to store our SS #, for example. Heck, at the rate things are going, they may have to start allowing people to change their SS # to start fresh.
A friend never allows her SS # to be used for anything. Not banks, not schools, not health insurance. They squawk and scream and threaten and she stands firm. No, she says, you can't have it. It's only for her retirement, not for generic identification purposes. So far she has successfully evaded spreading her most precious identifying information all over the internet in god knows how many incompetently coded and poorly safeguarded databases. Massachusetts also allows one to use a generated code instead of SS # on drivers licenses.
This thing is really out of hand. Of course, it's going to cost credit card companies millions of dollars when bogus bills start bouncing, and that's probably when the powers that be finally wake up and address the problem.
Yeah, I find ask slashdot useful too. When you filter out the "Why didn't you just google it, moron?" type comments and the "why would you want to do that anyway" trolls, you sometimes get some useful information and discussion regarding the various ways to solve the O.P.'s problem.
;-)
I see Ask Slashdot not as a substitute for a simple keyword search but rather a supplemental verification process. I have found that keyword searches don't necessarily reveal best practices; you get unedited, unrefuted claims that you have to sift through. In a reasonably informed techie discussion forum like Slashdot (sometimes), you can get some interesting debate and comparisons on various approaches and methodologies.
And, as you noted, it's a way to be exposed to problems which I don't currently have but might someday. Then when I encounter the problem, I hope a little fragment of memory in my aging brain will bubble to the surface to remind me that it's been discussed on Slashdot.
For researching technical problems, the best thing is to combine Google, Slashdot, Usenet newsgroups, and specialty forums such as (in the O.P.'s case) webhostingtalk.com, spend a little time in each place and take notes. From amongst voluminous chaff generally there's a bit of wheat to be harvested.
At the risk of belaboring the obvious, it should also be noted that the way to put useful information out there in the first place so that googlers can find it is precisely this sort of forum. Google is only your friend if there's something out there worth searching for.
I'd love to switch to Speakeasy; I like their TOS and I want the fixed IP addresses. However, $49.95 for 1.5M/256K/dialup does not compare favorably with Verizon's $45 for $1.5M/384K/dialup that I currently buy. Furthermore, for an additional $10 Verizon will bump the d/l speed to 3M. In terms of bandwidth, Speakeasy is no longer competitive with Verizon in eastern Massachusetts at least.
I have asked Speakeasy to address the bandwidth question but they have not responded as yet. They say you get better tech support with them, which is great, but the bandwidth is a 24/7 experience while the support is a rare experience even with Verizon. Granted Verizon support is poor but it's just not on the front burner.
Someone, set me straight on this. I'd be happy to switch to the "good guys" if given enough reasons.
If you get no response using your real name (presumably you have a non-Anglo Saxon or non-Indian surname), yet you get an immediate responses when you use English or Indian names, then you should immediately inundate them with thousands of variants of the successful name, all with identical or nearly-identical cv.
For example, if Rodion Romanovich Raskolnikov does not work but Hubert Penniweather does, then generate hundreds of "similar" names such as Hughie, Huguenot, Huffy, etc. Their personnel people will be so busy sending responses to these politically correct applicants that the company will implode.
Yeah, it's true that there's a lot of cloning and ripping off of established Western brands and a general disregard for intellectual property rights going on in east Asia, but in this instance I think the Chinese companies have a point.
They're claiming a patent cost of $20 per player. Think about it; it probably costs no more than $20 to make the damn things and who knows how much cheaper they'll get as they become totally commoditized. It's ridiculous. Pretty soon the majority cost of a computer system is going to be the IP tax. I say bring on the lawsuits and break this price fixing cartel.
Better yet, bring on the blue-ray 50G disks and let's just get past this mediocre, DRM-encumbered DVD mess.
This is just my personal experience, but I haven't found Firefox to be all that slick and streamlined as compared to Mozilla or anything else. Furthermore, it's rather unstable even in its 1.0 version and seems to crash arbitrarily under certain circumstances, in my case a couple of times a day.
Firefox takes about 10-12 seconds to load on a 900 Mh PIII system running a 2.6.x linux kernel, which is just long enough for me to start drumming my fingers impatiently. I tend to keep it in memory just so I won't have to wait for it to start up, which I don't like to do because it seems to become unstable after a while.
Firefox doesn't always render pages consistently; for example, quite often it messes up the Slashdot home page and I have to reload the page to view it properly. I wonder why this is.
I do appreciate the growing number of extensions for Firefox, though I wonder why they can't have been adapted for Mozilla since it also uses XUL. I currently use Image Zoom, Advanced Highlighter Button, User Agent Switcher, Web Developer, All-in-One Gestures, Nuke Anything, Print It, and Flashblock, and with these fine enhancements I have taken back control of my browsing experience. No more in-your-face flash explosions, a really well done mouse gestures tool, and the ability to zoom images or even remove them from the page. This has made browsing fun again!
I miss the stability and "solid feel" of Mozilla but I like some of the little GUI doo-dads that Firefox has and I'm looking forward to lots more innovations from these folks. I also like the fact that the world is finally writing web pages for multiple browsers again after a very dark period from 1999-2002 when IE reigned.
I concur; the T5 was a big disappointment. I was looking for an excuse to upgrade my Tungsten T but will just have to keep on waiting.
I use the voice recorder every day and can't live without it. If I "upgraded" to the T5, I'd have to buy a digital recorder to carry around. No way.
Every time I record something using the voice recorder, people are amazed: "You mean that thing records too? Where can I get one?" The "wow" factor is there and Palm has thrown it out with the bath water.
Furthermore, my T|T functions as a handy guitar tuner, which I assume the T5 can't do because it lacks a microphone.
I have a couple of 512MB flash cards so the T5's built-in flash RAM does nothing for me. The non-volatile memory feature is nice, but my T|T runs Backup Man every day at 2AM and that pretty much covers it.
Wifi is the killer feature for which I'd upgrade, but the T5 doesn't have it; I'd have to spend an additional $100 and give up my SD slot.
Now turning to the Treo 650, I continue to be disappointed. OK, so Walt Mossberg of the Wall Street Journal has endorsed it, so it's guaranteed to be a prestige purchase among executives.
If the Treo had built-in wifi and (enabled) DUN via bluetooth and maybe a few more megs of RAM then I'd be all over that puppy. However it feels like almost a downgrade from T|T and my trusty Startac phone and modem card.
Palm, let's see a Treo with the features of T3, wifi, bluetooth, voice recorder, nothing crippled, and you will have the killer app of 2005. The fact that a hacker had to add back in the obvious necessary features tells you that something's totally wrong with Palm marketing.
The good news is that Palm's moving to Linux as the base OS, so maybe future hacks (a.k.a. community contributions) will be easier and more common. Too little too late perhaps but time will tell.
The official explanation is that the voltage capacity of Tungsten T and T2 models is not high enough to support a wifi card. Sandisk also developed a wifi SD card but they, too, only support the high end models. Maybe later this year PalmOne will smarten up and release a T6 with built-in wifi and microphone, the way Nature intended it to be. ;-)
If you are job hunting, try applying to companies run by people with doctorates; they seem more likely to hire based on that degree, since they understand the pain and effort it takes to get one. I have been at a couple of start-ups with PhDs in prominent positions, and they were respectful and gave large consideration to applicants with similar academic accomplishments.
It's not to say that you need any sort of degree at all to succeed in the IT field; indeed, some of the best programmers I have ever met scarcely possessed a high school diploma. I'm just recommending this strategy because people have a natural tendency to hire their own.
Many of the eastern European immigrants who arrived during the previous great wave of immigration (1879-1929) had no intention of staying; they planned to find jobs, make a pile of money, and take it home with them. However, as with most of the best laid plans, things did not turn out as they expected. Young and energetic and hard working, they found jobs, settled down, raised families, and suddenly the option of going back home simply didn't exist anymore.
I think people should be encouraged to come work here because such folk tend to have a higher average level of energy and diligence, and their children are more likely to go on to university and continue their parents' high level of contributions to the economy. It simply makes good sense to welcome them with open arms. Telling them they're not welcome unless they intend to stay seems a bit contradictory.
Yes, an SD card drive lets you carry "arbitrary" files around but they cannot be directly used by the Palm unless they are converted to a Palm compatible format. Not last I checked. I contacted Dataviz a year or so ago to inquire about handling native text files and they confirmed that their application does not do this. It can, however, handle native Microsoft Office files such as Word and Excel, if that floats your boat.
You state correctly that Palm Desktop (or JPilot for us Linux users) allows cut and pasting into Memo fields (also note fields in Address Book). This is all good.
But it would be nice to be able to throw a bunch of text files, HTML, XML, whatever, on a memory card and then view them on the Palm without any PC-based importation or conversion steps. I'm really surprised that no one's done a text file viewer and thrown it onto Sourceforge.net yet (yeah yeah, if I had the time....).
Also really nice would be a (native file format) OpenOffice.org viewer/editor app for PalmOS. To my knowledge (please tell me I'm wrong) there's no such beast as of yet. It's highly unlikely that Dataviz or QuickOffice is going to implement this any time soon, though of course you can always export your OOo documents as Word format, then use them on the Palm--I've done this numerous times but it's not as convenient.
It's surprising, or maybe not actually, that articles such as the Houston Chronicle piece referenced by the OP completely ignore the most obvious approaches to "green" energy use. Insulation of every building, passive solar heating and electricity generation on every rooftop where it's feasible, more public transportation, and a crash program to incentivize use of fuel efficient cars would go a long way to mitigate if not solve the energy problem. It's not sexy but it works.
Up front costs may be higher for solar and other alternative and supplemental systems, but long term the payoff is there. You have to be willing to wait 10-15 years for your solar power array to pay for itself and then some.
Americans have a centralized power mindset; it's difficult to imagine a power plant on every block, or solar and fuel cells in every house. Yet, that's much more in keeping with the American tradition of pioneer self-reliance.
I searched for "tiananmen massacre". Amazingly, a few sites actually came up that mention the 1989 shootings of students in Tiananmen Square, but the top 10 also includes Texas chainsaw massacre and a few other irrelevancies. There were almost no major news sites in the search results.
Conversely, Google returns a lot more relevant hits on this subject many of which are major, reputable news sites with "Tiananmen Massacre" shown prominently in the summaries.
I would say, stick to Google.
It figures that Bill Clinton would endorse this crummy Google wannabe. Whatever one may think of Clinton, his China policy was rather undistinguished and ineffectual.
You, my friend, are a sucker in every aspect of the word. You bought a phone because of all the gimmicks without actually making sure it was adequate as a phone.
Strong words there, fella. How is he a sucker merely for buying a highly recommended product and then trying to get some problems fixed?
I'm very interested in the Treo 650 and I really appreciate users like him airing possible problems with the product and looking for solutions that will keep him from returning it.
My guess (and hope) is that it's a software problem that can be fixed with a flash rom upgrade or some such.
The Treo 650's not that bad a product. I haven't heard any complaints about the Treo as pda; it's got a really nice screen and all the usual Palm apps. The camera is OK, the bluetooth is nice except that Sprint disabled dial-up networking (they promise to enable it in a future software upgrade), and Palm's giving out free 128MB SD cards to its customers as a temporary fix for the memory problem.
I'm waiting for T-Mobile and Verizon to start offering it, so I can choose between the competition for my next contract. But I'd prefer a Treo 700 that included wifi and a little more memory.
Based on my memories of the event....
This is a question of where does the buck stop--with the probable perpetrators or incompetents who caused the accident, or with the regional VP, or with Indian government officials who exacerbated the problems, or with the president and chairman of the U.S. company that owned the plant. It's really not all that clear.
The Union Carbide Bhopal plant was operated and managed by Indians; it was an all-Indian staff. When the incident occurred that released toxic fumes, there were thousands of people living right outside the fences of the facility in shanty towns. It was not the smartest idea to live next to a chemical plant in the first place, but the Indians were lackadaisical about such things. After the incident, it was reported that the plant staff were dispersed to other parts of India and were mysteriously unavailable for questioning by the Americans. What's more, the whole incident was immediately blamed on the Americans by a hostile Indian government intent on scapegoating the U.S. and collecting billions of dollars in damages.
Recall that at this time India was the leader of the "unaligned movement", a group of nations which played the U.S. off against the U.S.S.R. Indira Gandhi was quite anti-American and India was very restrictive about foreign investments. Consequently poverty endured there until very recently, when the information revolution finally cracked their shell open.
Yes, Bhopal was a terrible tragedy, but the Indian government deserves some of the blame for their craven role as an exploiter of the disaster for political purposes.
it would allow IBM to further distance itself from Microsoft and Intel.
I don't quite follow your logic here. The manufacturer has the most control over the product. If IBM wanted to, they could manufacture desktops and laptops that conformed closely to Linux specifications and the heck with what Microsoft wants. They could make Linux their internal corporate standard, roll it out to 100,000 workers, and promote it heavily to their partners. This might cost them a couple billion dollars but that's a drop in the bucket for them and would do more to annoy Microsoft than simply ceding the PC business to some Chinese manufacturer.
I believe that in fact IBM is just doing what they have always done; when a market is no longer highly profitable, they get out. GE is similar; they are one of the most profitable corporations in the world, and they are quick to jettison a business if its margins are not acceptable.
Probably, the C-level soothsayers at Big Blue are looking down the line a few years and predicting that PC and laptop technology is going to continue trending toward a cheap Asian-built commodity to the point where all the profits will be on the service and support side. This is just a continuation of their move toward a service and support organization. Let others sweat the manufacturing and razor-thin profit margins while IBM reaps the fat rewards of being the world's premier technology services company.
That said, I too mourn the passing of the excellent Thinkpads, but we'll all get over it. Buying a Dell every 18 months and staying on the leading edge is better than buying a Thinkpad every three years.
I'm thinking of upgrading my Palm Tungsten T to a Treo 650 (or its successor), to get rid of my Motorola Startac. Can the Treo get my laptop online via Bluetooth and DUN?
Currently, I do dial-up networking on my laptop using my Startac and an Ositech card but it's relatively slow--19.2kbps. I have a Verizon ISP dial-up account for $10/month, just a supplement to DSL for travel purposes or when DSL is down. If the Treo can replace this Ositech/Startac system, then it sounds like a great solution, but only if I don't need to hack my Treo to get DUN working!
Undoubtedly Gates is just like thousands of other executives; he has assistants who read his email for him. An executive of a company as large and powerful as Microsoft hardly would have time to read and respond to the typical 300-500 emails one gets in a day, let alone the thousands or millions he gets from being famous. I feel sorry for the guy, in a way; he used to be a computer geek just like so many others and he's cut off from part of the internet just by virtue of his success.
It does sound like an excellent opportunity to leverage some of that computer brainpower they have and create some first class spam filtering technology. With a test base of 4 million spams a day they have all the sample data they will ever need.
Yes, that's what the FA says. The problem is that it is a poor basis for raising revenue that perpetuates unfairness. (That's leaving aside the enforceability issues and the simple cost of installing this monstrosity.)
Consider, for example, how some municipalities make millions of dollars a year from parking fines. In Boston, that's traditionally been a major revenue source, and meter cops were encouraged by quotas to overinterpret the law and nail people who were 12 inches out of compliance with distance to the curb, or 1 minute overdue on their meter, etc. (This only began to subside a bit in the late 1980s after the infamous case of a driver in Boston who pulled over, fell out of his car, and lay on the sidewalk having a heart attack; as you can guess, a traffic cop proceeded to ticket his car WHILE HE WAS LYING THERE and the whole sorry scene was captured in a photograph for the Boston Globe's front page.)
Anyway, just because cities and towns develop a dependency on this form of revenue does not mean it is a fair or proper way to raise money. In fact, it encourages people to have contempt for the law and for the law to have contempt for people. Stupid, stupid.
We already pay an enormous amount of taxes to keep our cars on the road. Initial sales tax (in most states), annual excise tax based on the value of the car, automobile insurance which is highly regulated and taxed in most states, gasoline sales tax, tolls, license plate renewal fee, drivers license renewal fee, and speeding and parking fines. No doubt I'm forgetting a few things. Ted Kennedy's luxury tax if your car is > $100K?
I believe that gasoline actually should be taxed much more than it is. Go ahead, California; raise the gas tax to $1 a gallon. It's regressive taxation, admittedly, especially for contractors who have to drive vans and pickup trucks and the like, but overall it will help spur the adoption of alternative fuels such as corn-based methanol and coal- or solar-based hydrogen, which will be tremendously beneficial long term. And dare one mention public transportation? Cities without practical bus and subway systems--well, the voters should face the music and ante up for these programs, because as the boomer population ages it's going to become ever more important. Twenty years from now there are going to be about 90 million 75-year-olds out there driving; look out, world.
I used to use Opera; I paid for the full edition, and enjoyed its many innovative features such as tabs, convenient keyboard shortcuts for things like turning off image display, nice bookmark management, excellent mouse gestures, save-and-restore session, and on and on. At one time, it was the best browser by far for Linux, and it was an appealing alternative to IE on Windows. They really had the UI aspects down pat.
However, it crashed about once a day on my Redhat workstation and no amount of back and forth with tech support could uncover the problem.
Meanwhile, Mozilla appeared on the scene and got better and better. I would say that today, the Mozilla/Firefox family surpasses Opera in enough ways that Opera doesn't really have a niche like it used to.
I still like some of Opera's UI aspects best, but good old Moz is so stable now that it's a toss-up. Firefox has finally stabilized to where it doesn't crash on me 2-3 times a session, and I'm evaluating it as a replacement for Mozilla. Its font handling seems not as good as Mozilla though. I do dearly miss Opera's style sheet extension that lets you force word wrap on any web page with a simple keystroke.
One thing about Opera that bothered me was that they had a cut-off for owners of the previous version; you had to pay to upgrade. At that I drew the line and see no reason to put any more $ into that product, though I still appreciate their alternativeness and wish them well in their fight against the Microsoft titan.
Has anyone created a Linux distro especially for audio applications? It seems as though there are thousands of people out there who need it, and it takes an inordinate amount of effort to get the general Linux distribution to do audio properly.
:(
I just upgraded my Redhat 8 system to Fedora Core 2 to take advantage of lots of security fixes. The old system used OSS for audio and while it wasn't perfect and lots of apps (Rosegarden, e.g.) don't use OSS, most things worked. Now I'm struggling with getting alsa to work properly with things like mplayer and Crossover. I can't record from the audio input, I can't watch AVI or MPEG videos, Microsoft Media Player under Crossover has no sound, and the docs and FAQs are of little help. OSS Emulation doesn't seem to work all that well unless I've got something really basic set up wrong.
If someone out there were to take Fedora and smooth out the audio stuff so that musicians and music fans could just install it and run with it, it would be a tremendous help. I guess it's time to put in some suggestions at fedora.redhat.com and hope they can devote some time to this soon.
In the meantime, my audio recording work happens on my Compaq laptop running Windows 2K Pro, Adobe Audition, and USB MIDI Man
Newer Palms (OS 5) can multitask, at least as far as playing MP3 goes. For example, if you fire up the bundled RealPlayer to listen to playlists of MP3s, you can immediately change to another app and the playback continues in the background.
:(
Wifi is a neat thing but Palm has been behind on this for a long time. They only recently released a wifi SD card, but it's only compatible with a few models (T2, T3, T5, Zire 72) because of design issues in older Palm SD slots
"Relatively cheaply" applies much more to a Palm Zire than it does to the iPaq and Axim that you cited. These latter two are excellent handhelds, but the Zire has such a low cost of entry as to be practically an impulse purchase for non-corporate users.
Palm did one thing right in recent years and that was to purchase Handspring to get a hold of the Treo line. The Treo is consistently rated the best of the hybrid phone/PDA's by influential writers like the WSJ's Walt Mossberg, though it is not without its flaws. If Palm continues to improve the Treo in ways that the consumer finds compelling, they may well survive as a niche player. It's hard to see anyone surviving as a pure play PDA maker in the next five years.
Regarding Documents-to-Go, I just save my OpenOffice documents in Microsoft format and copy them to the Palm (Tungsten T in my case). Usually in fact I just dump documents on the memory card. This works pretty well. Actually I use QuickOffice these days but same thing.
Still, it would have been really, really nice of Palm to officially support Linux. I can actually run Palm Desktop under Crossover Wine, but of course Hotsync doesn't work and that kills it right there. JPilot's fine but I do miss the slickness of the Palm Desktop.
My main gripe regarding document reading and editing on the Palm is the compressed format most apps insist on. In an age of 512MB memory cards for $30 and 16-64MB main memory, I would rather just use standard plain text files, and dispense with this converting to pdb. Even Adobe Acrobat Reader for the Palm requires you to run your pdfs through this annoying Windows converter before it can read them.
I'm with you on the poor support for wi-fi. PalmOne provided an SD/MMC slot on the Tungsten T but didn't give it enough voltage to run a wifi card. The T3 slot works, so yeah maybe I'll get one someday. But then, they came out with the T5 and they don't include built-in wifi, hoping we'll all spring for the extra cost card. Had they included wifi, and had they not removed the microphone/voice recorder circuitry, and maybe thrown in the Zire camera, I'd call it the best handheld on the market. As it is, the T3 is a better product. Stupid Palm, they've blown it again. I love the voice recorder. I record lectures, concerts, and quick memos every day, and I have a digital guitar tuner app that works great. Everyone I show it to is blown away--"You mean that thing can record, too?" Besides, don't Pocket PCs have microphones?
The bottom line is that PalmOne these days is run by bean counters. At least their dim simian consciousnesses perceived a winner in the Treo so they bought Handspring, but now watch them kill it with their 80-20 rule: we only need to please 80% of the market, the 20% who demand those extra features aren't worth it. They totally failed to support Linux, and their Macintosh support is lackluster, even though Palm's primary software adversary is Microsoft. Too bad, Palm; I'm gonna miss you. It was fun while it lasted!
Agreed, what's all the fuss about? These aren't autonomous robots; they're just mechanical extensions of a human being who is operating them from safe inside a bunker or a tank.
Iraq seems like the perfect place to test and perfect this technology. Build a couple thousand of these drones, fit them with rapid fire guns, tear gas, and some nasty explosives in case they become disabled inside enemy territory or just for a little "suicide" mission here and there. Send'em rolling into some of these God-forsaken places like Sammara and Fallujah and let THEM take the bullets.
I don't want to any more Americans hurt. These insurgents, though, the ones who do the beheading and the blowing up of Iraqi children and women and unarmed Iraqi Guard trainees. Waste'em. Use them as target practice. Make them afraid to go to the potty, with our robots crawling all the hell over the place.
In fact this would be a profitable venture if the Pentagon ever thought of it that way. They could sell control of some of the pacbots to any citizen. Get six hours of mayhem for only $150!!! You will remotely control a pacbot from the safety of your living room; all you need is a modern browser. Joystick recommended. You will get an online scorecard, nickname, and chatboard to compare your hits with those of your friends. A true people's war!