What is your GSM carrier and plan, and how are you liking it? I will be using VoiceStream in the Kansas City area, so would be especially interested if that is your carrier. Can you get VoiceStream iStream service on the Treo?
I am using voicestream, and it's fine. I've used Nextel in the past, and, as far as I can tell, Voicestream is just as good. They seem a little cheaper than Sprint (at least when I signed up) and I have so far had no problems. The free weekends are also especially nice for data connections. I find Istream to be completely unnecessary. Voicestream and the Treo install software both claim I have to pay an extra fee for Data service and have my own ISP. That's not true - I followed the directions on this article and connect to the internet in six seconds without paying anything. I can't say how long it will last - but it's great for the moment. One friend suggested voicestream does this on purpose, because it's cheaper for them to provide an ISP than it is to provide an outgoing line out of their network for me to connect to an outside ISP. Interestng idea.
How annoying is the short battery life? I am not a road warrior, so I can charge my phone nightly. Is that good enough?
I don't think the battery life is all that short. I think it's rated at something like 2.5 hours of talk time, and a coupla' days standby time. Going for two days is stretching it, but if you charge every night there should be no problem unless you talk on the phone a lot.
How bad is the rumored problem with "face oil" on the screen from talking on the phone?
Some people reported that this was a problem with the visorphone. I had a visorphone before my Treo, but never had this problem. On the visorphone, the speaker is angled away, so to hear anything, you have to hold the screen away from your face. The Treo is set up just like a regular flip-phone, so this never becomes a problem. I've been using mine for about a week and have never had this problem.
How are you carrying the thing? I am thinking I'll need a belt case, since it isn't going to fit into a hip pocket like my little cell phone.
I just carry it in my pocket. It's larger than tiny cellphones, but not all that much. It also fits comfortably in a shirt pocket. Handspring has a belt-clip carrying case that they're releasing soon, but I don't think I'll need it. I do tend to wear baggy pants, though...
Have people gotten tired of you answering the phone by flipping up the cover and saying, "Kirk here?"
Hell no! I even got the Trek Sounds hack just to be even more geeky, and everyone thinks I'm really cool!:)
Overall, I love the thing! Making the Visorphone first as a beta test was a really good idea, because it had a lot of flaws, but so far I'd have to say that they've vastly improved almost everything with the Treo.
I just got a treo last week and I absolutely love it! As a former Visorphone owner, I can say that it has improved almost every feature that the Visorphone offered.
The treo doesn't provide all of the features of the blackberry, however. The big draw seems to be the packet switched, always-on network. It would be nice to have a little light start blinking whenever I have an email. With the treo, I have to dial into an ISP and check the mail like I used to do on a computer.
I guess it wouldn't be too big a deal to setup an email filtering program that automatically sends me an SMS message whenever an email arrives marked urgent, or when it has been sent from specific people.
I think Yahoo mail already offers a service where if the body of the message contains a specific codeword, it will auto-forward to another email address. This could easily be a cellphone - which would be a great way to get important email immediately.
He also recommends regular posters sign up for "personal injury" coverage option offered with most homeowner insurance policies. It covers legal costs if the policyholder is sued for defamation.
I didn't realize this was an option - but it's a really good idea. I wonder what kinds of insurance policies are available like this. I'd like to be covered for any kind of legal costs - from civil suits to criminal.
It seems like with civil suit coverage, corporations have a lot less leverage against individuals to infringe on our rights by the meer threat of lawsuits.
I really like the internet sharing feature of this box. I understand that a lot of people have capped upstream bandwidth from home, and that because of this it would take forever to send a show to someone... But hopefully these draconian restrictions will be lifted... When we all have decent broadband, which might happen in the not-so-distant future, this will be a really cool feature.
Now: Me: Dude, I missed Futurama last night! Can you capture it, encode it, and then put it on your server so I can grab it? Friend: "I guess..."
The Future: Me: "Dude, I missed Futurama last night!"
Friend: "No problem... " hits a couple of buttons.. "You'll have it in an hour."
I've also been using the visorphone for a few months, and, generally I love it, but it is certainly not perfect.
The sound quality on my unit is pretty bad. I can hear the person I'm talking to just fine, but everyone says my voice is accompanied by loud buzzing noises. It sounds like interferance, and the weaker the signal is, the louder the interferance, as if it gets worse when the phone has to jack up its output to compensate.
It is nice to only carry one device, although I have to admit that carrying a small cellphone and separate visor wouldn't be much bigger. The phone battery really adds a lot of bulk to the visor. And then there's the fairly-rare but oh-so inconvenient times when the palm crashes hard and has to be reset, and I've lost all my settings and phone data until I can manage to re-synch to my computer.
My favorite things about it are the geek appeal: I can browse the web and check my email with the visor display instead of some crappy cellphone. The data connection is slow, but the interface is quite usable.
My overall opinion is that it's a great toy for geeks, but the more mainstream people probably wouldn't want to put up with its quirkiness.
Is there some way to stripe actual systems? Rather than having four or five drives striped in a single system, could I have four or five systems each with one drive, but mounted as one physical volume? How could that be configured?
While this would be a little more expensive, it would be much more fault tolerant. Nothing short of the switch breaking or two systems breaking simultaneously could bring down the system.
I would be afraid to put a system like the one described in the article in use for fear that a power supply or RAM chip would go bad, and all of my data would be inaccessable until I could replace it.
Sometimes the memory of the product is very subtle. Many ads today are deliberately oblique: they have an engaging story line, but it is hard to tell what they are trying to sell. Afterward you may not remember the product consciously. Yet advertisers believe that if they have gotten your attention, when you later go to the store you will feel better or more comfortable with a given product because you have a vague recollection of having heard of it.
This is interesting. Has anyone else noticed the trend lately of commercials doing this? Advertisers will pay gobs and gobs of money for a 30 second spot, and then only mention the name of the product in the last few seconds of the spot. After viewing some of these commercials, I find myself thinking, "Wow, that was neat. What was being advertised?"
I only spend an hour or two a week watching television, but I tend to find the commercials at least as interesting as the "content." There's almost certainly more money spent on them...
I only have one computer connected to my cable modem. It's an old NT box. It happens to have two nics in it, though, and it serves the rest of the house. But I do in fact only have one computer connected to the cable modem. What I do with my own internal network is my business!
Columbine Families Play the Blame Game
The families of several victims of the 1999 Columbine High School shootings file a $5 billion lawsuit against 25 video game publishers, including Nintendo, Sega, Sony, id Software, and GT Interactive.
Wow, I'd never even heard about this. Anyone know how it turned out? I wonder if I can sue these companies for causing me to waste my life away in front of a television...
Re:The World Trade Center apparently never existed
on
History of Video Games
·
· Score: 2, Funny
No, this is a really good idea!
Remember when you were a little kid, and your friends would do things to annoy you? Eventually, you learned that if you ignore them instead of reacting, they would leave you alone, because they didn't get the reaction they wanted.
America is remembering the lessons we learned as little kids. Instead of getting all huffy-puffy about the buildings being knocked down, we'll just completely erase all memories of them!
Bin Laden: Haha, America! I knocked your shit down! America: Huh? There were never any buildings there in the first place. Notice this flight simulator from 2000. There are just blank spots where you claim there were some "buildings." Bin Laden (exasperated): I... HATE... YOU!!!!
Clearly, we can win by not giving him the satisfaction of thinking he did anything.
But can you backtrack through a google cache? pointym5 writes "Checked out the ZeoSync web site lately?
No, you can't backtrack through a google cache, but you can backtrack through the Web Archive's caches and they do have one link to Zeosync's website from July of 2001. Of course they didn't seem to have links to all those people back then, either.
The poll is still available here . It carries no warnings or disclaimers that the poll has been massively rigged by Microsoft.
Looks like they read your comment. They've added a disclaimer:
On 21 December, ZDNet posted a story reporting the preliminary results of this poll, which showed a large majority of respondents who said they planned to deliver applications via Web services by the end of 2002 favoured Java for the job. At the time, Java outranked.Net by a factor of three in this poll. By early January, the position had reversed; the results are shown here. An investigation indicated that Microsoft employees used vote-rigging to distort the results. The full story can be found here.
When I was a child, watching falling stars with my dad, I voiced a concern that one might hit me. He put one of those "happy birthday" paper party hats on my head, and called it an asteroid detection system.
Confused, I asked him how it worked. He said, "When the hat is crushed by an asteroid, there's an imminent danger!"
I find it very annoying to try to install Microsoft patches. I work in a place where I am responsible for several windows installations. When I install a M$ OS, in order to patch it, i have to:
1. Start IE (click through internet connection wizard)
2. Open the windows update website
3. Download an activeX application to determine what updates I need
4. Download and install the updates (often, more than 5!) one at a time, rebooting in between each one!
It's so much easier to swivel my chair around to my redhat box and do a simple 'up2date -i'.
I wonder if there's any particular reason why Microsoft makes it so difficult? Do they actually like their security holes?
New York-based Take-Two Interactive Software Inc. said on Wednesday it plans to modify the hit criminal adventure game so that it could be sold in Australia by January.
This will be great! I bet GTA3 will be even better when they cut out the parts that involve stealing cars and killing people!
Wrong - use your head man. If all of AT&T's customers used 100% their cable modem's capacity 24 hours a day, you would not be getting broadband for $40 a month.
He didn't say he wanted to use his maximum cablemodem bandwidth constantly - he said he expected the 128k he was guaranteed. By my calculations, that's less than 1/12th of the bandwidth of a T1.
What should be in the the TOS of cable companies is total bandwidth allocation. In Austin, Time Warner has nothing like that in their TOS. However, if you use "too much," they will shut you down and make you call in to have the service turned back on. When we asked how much was "too much," they wouldn't tell us - because they want the right to make arbitrary decsions.
A friend of mine tried to determine the maximum upstream bandwidth allowed before a customer is marked as "bad." I forget the exact numbers, but it was something like 10 gigs up in a month could cause your service to be shut off... I could do that with a 56k modem!
The computer that reads and encrypts the message should be a laptop, running on battery power, in a room completely shielded from RF inteferance. Don't forget about the Tempest attack.
I think that if the FBI tried hard enough, they'll always be able to get at your data. And what if they decide to start watching little old me, who isn't actually doing anything illegal, and therefore doesn't take such security precautions? Don't I still have a right to privacy?
A new video codec will boost performance 20 percent over current-generation video codecs, and will enable the playback of high-definition 720 x 1,280 progressive scan video at 24 frames per second, said Will Poole, vice president of the Windows Digital Media Division of Microsoft. Using Windows Media's 4-to-1 compression ratio advantage over MPEG-2, "studios could put all the Godfather movies or an entire musician's discography on a single CD," said Poole.
Ok, I might believe that windows media compresses 20% better than DVD. But I refuse to believe that using windows media format, you can fit ALL the Godfather movies on ONE CD.
Total = 545 minutes. Even on a 700 meg CD, that's 1.28 megabytes per minute for audio and video, or 23 KILOBYTES per second. . I wonder how good that's gonna look?
"Junis's e-mail -- routed to Kabul, then Islamabad, then London" is not the way it would go - if I remember correctly, the main Pakistani bandwidth goes via Singapore. Unless Katz means this email was sent to someone in Kabul who forwarded it to someone etc etc etc.
In which case I'd hazard a guess to say the first passing was on paper, not electronically.
No. Actually, it does appear to go through london.
...
8 gbr1-p70.auttx.ip.att.net (12.123.133.22) 11.641 ms 10.797 ms 8.374 ms
9 gbr4-p10.dlstx.ip.att.net (12.122.2.109) 6.448 ms 7.822 ms 6.348 ms
10 gbr3-p60.dlstx.ip.att.net (12.122.1.137) 5.109 ms 6.612 ms 6.426 ms
11 gbr4-p40.attga.ip.att.net (12.122.3.38) 20.097 ms 31.047 ms 36.354 ms
12 gbr4-p10.wswdc.ip.att.net (12.122.2.162) 51.647 ms 48.060 ms *
13 gbr3-p60.wswdc.ip.att.net (12.122.1.129) 51.222 ms 51.025 ms 51.342 ms
14 gbr3-p20.n54ny.ip.att.net (12.122.3.53) 58.926 ms 59.912 ms 57.151 ms
15 * gbr1-p100.n54ny.ip.att.net (12.122.1.150) 59.479 ms 58.959 ms
16 t2a1-p4-0-0.us-ny.concert.net (192.205.32.74) 71.585 ms 84.599 ms 92.313 ms
17 t1c1-ge6-0.us-ny.concert.net (166.49.224.1) 214.112 ms 263.098 ms 285.189 ms
18 t2c1-ge7-0.us-ny.concert.net (166.49.224.43) 95.119 ms 95.564 ms 111.339 ms
19 t2c1-p2-0.uk-lon2.concert.net (166.49.164.45) 180.919 ms 158.820 ms 165.064 ms
20 t2a3-ge5-0-0.uk-lon2.concert.net (166.49.176.19) 167.730 ms 168.101 ms 179.358 ms 21 166.49.218.158 (166.49.218.158) 507.199 ms 494.285 ms 451.786 ms
22 islamabad-gw1.comsats.net.pk (210.56.8.1) 334.508 ms 319.926 ms 351.413 ms
I think I prefer spam to snail mail advertisements. At least with spam I can just hit the delete key. And even though spammers whine about the fact that they are paying for the spam to be delivered, I guess I'm in the minority in that my ISP's bill doesn't go up every month depending on the number of spams I get
Now don't get me wrong, I still hate spam in my inbox, but at least these people aren't cutting down trees to clutter my physical space with their message - information that if I wanted, I could go out and get myself!
From the initial information, which is quite sparse, this doesn't follow the pattern of the earlier terrorist attacks. If it crashed while it was comming in for a landing, it would do much less damage, because I assume it would have much less fuel. Also, if you have control of an airplane, why not ram it into a tall building instead of some houses?
Of course we know so little at this point, speculating seems pointless..
In a joint statement, the networks said the device ``violates the rights of copyright owners in unprecedented ways'' and ``deprives the copyright owners of the means by which they are paid for their creative content and thus reduces the incentive to create programming and make it available to the public.''
This little box is violating their rights? It's an inanimate object - it can't! Much like the saying, guns don't kill people, people kill people.... I wish these industry types would get it through their heads that its their customers who are supposedly violating their rights, not some box. Rather than attacking the box, they should try to jail their customers who illegaly copy stuff.
Slashdot Mirror
What is your GSM carrier and plan, and how are you liking it? I will be using VoiceStream in the Kansas City area, so would be especially interested if that is your carrier. Can you get VoiceStream iStream service on the Treo?
:)
I am using voicestream, and it's fine. I've used Nextel in the past, and, as far as I can tell, Voicestream is just as good. They seem a little cheaper than Sprint (at least when I signed up) and I have so far had no problems. The free weekends are also especially nice for data connections. I find Istream to be completely unnecessary. Voicestream and the Treo install software both claim I have to pay an extra fee for Data service and have my own ISP. That's not true - I followed the directions on this article and connect to the internet in six seconds without paying anything. I can't say how long it will last - but it's great for the moment. One friend suggested voicestream does this on purpose, because it's cheaper for them to provide an ISP than it is to provide an outgoing line out of their network for me to connect to an outside ISP. Interestng idea.
How annoying is the short battery life? I am not a road warrior, so I can charge my phone nightly. Is that good enough?
I don't think the battery life is all that short. I think it's rated at something like 2.5 hours of talk time, and a coupla' days standby time. Going for two days is stretching it, but if you charge every night there should be no problem unless you talk on the phone a lot.
How bad is the rumored problem with "face oil" on the screen from talking on the phone?
Some people reported that this was a problem with the visorphone. I had a visorphone before my Treo, but never had this problem. On the visorphone, the speaker is angled away, so to hear anything, you have to hold the screen away from your face. The Treo is set up just like a regular flip-phone, so this never becomes a problem. I've been using mine for about a week and have never had this problem.
How are you carrying the thing? I am thinking I'll need a belt case, since it isn't going to fit into a hip pocket like my little cell phone.
I just carry it in my pocket. It's larger than tiny cellphones, but not all that much. It also fits comfortably in a shirt pocket. Handspring has a belt-clip carrying case that they're releasing soon, but I don't think I'll need it. I do tend to wear baggy pants, though...
Have people gotten tired of you answering the phone by flipping up the cover and saying, "Kirk here?"
Hell no! I even got the Trek Sounds hack just to be even more geeky, and everyone thinks I'm really cool!
Overall, I love the thing! Making the Visorphone first as a beta test was a really good idea, because it had a lot of flaws, but so far I'd have to say that they've vastly improved almost everything with the Treo.
I just got a treo last week and I absolutely love it! As a former Visorphone owner, I can say that it has improved almost every feature that the Visorphone offered.
The treo doesn't provide all of the features of the blackberry, however. The big draw seems to be the packet switched, always-on network. It would be nice to have a little light start blinking whenever I have an email. With the treo, I have to dial into an ISP and check the mail like I used to do on a computer.
I guess it wouldn't be too big a deal to setup an email filtering program that automatically sends me an SMS message whenever an email arrives marked urgent, or when it has been sent from specific people.
I think Yahoo mail already offers a service where if the body of the message contains a specific codeword, it will auto-forward to another email address. This could easily be a cellphone - which would be a great way to get important email immediately.
He also recommends regular posters sign up for "personal injury" coverage option offered with most homeowner insurance policies. It covers legal costs if the policyholder is sued for defamation.
I didn't realize this was an option - but it's a really good idea. I wonder what kinds of insurance policies are available like this. I'd like to be covered for any kind of legal costs - from civil suits to criminal.
It seems like with civil suit coverage, corporations have a lot less leverage against individuals to infringe on our rights by the meer threat of lawsuits.
I really like the internet sharing feature of this box. I understand that a lot of people have capped upstream bandwidth from home, and that because of this it would take forever to send a show to someone... But hopefully these draconian restrictions will be lifted... When we all have decent broadband, which might happen in the not-so-distant future, this will be a really cool feature.
Now:
Me: Dude, I missed Futurama last night! Can you capture it, encode it, and then put it on your server so I can grab it?
Friend: "I guess..."
The Future:
Me: "Dude, I missed Futurama last night!"
Friend: "No problem... " hits a couple of buttons.. "You'll have it in an hour."
The very last page of the timeline has a disclaimer by British Telecom:
Products and services described in this publication are subject to availability and may be modified from time to time.
I guess BT is going to personally deliver all these advances, and deliver them when and if they want to.
I've also been using the visorphone for a few months, and, generally I love it, but it is certainly not perfect.
The sound quality on my unit is pretty bad. I can hear the person I'm talking to just fine, but everyone says my voice is accompanied by loud buzzing noises. It sounds like interferance, and the weaker the signal is, the louder the interferance, as if it gets worse when the phone has to jack up its output to compensate.
It is nice to only carry one device, although I have to admit that carrying a small cellphone and separate visor wouldn't be much bigger. The phone battery really adds a lot of bulk to the visor. And then there's the fairly-rare but oh-so inconvenient times when the palm crashes hard and has to be reset, and I've lost all my settings and phone data until I can manage to re-synch to my computer.
My favorite things about it are the geek appeal: I can browse the web and check my email with the visor display instead of some crappy cellphone. The data connection is slow, but the interface is quite usable.
My overall opinion is that it's a great toy for geeks, but the more mainstream people probably wouldn't want to put up with its quirkiness.
Is there some way to stripe actual systems? Rather than having four or five drives striped in a single system, could I have four or five systems each with one drive, but mounted as one physical volume? How could that be configured?
While this would be a little more expensive, it would be much more fault tolerant. Nothing short of the switch breaking or two systems breaking simultaneously could bring down the system.
I would be afraid to put a system like the one described in the article in use for fear that a power supply or RAM chip would go bad, and all of my data would be inaccessable until I could replace it.
Meh. Blind. Whatever. It works (see #4). So who cares if I'm blind?
Sometimes the memory of the product is very subtle. Many ads today are deliberately oblique: they have an engaging story line, but it is hard to tell what they are trying to sell. Afterward you may not remember the product consciously. Yet advertisers believe that if they have gotten your attention, when you later go to the store you will feel better or more comfortable with a given product because you have a vague recollection of having heard of it.
This is interesting. Has anyone else noticed the trend lately of commercials doing this? Advertisers will pay gobs and gobs of money for a 30 second spot, and then only mention the name of the product in the last few seconds of the spot. After viewing some of these commercials, I find myself thinking, "Wow, that was neat. What was being advertised?"
I only spend an hour or two a week watching television, but I tend to find the commercials at least as interesting as the "content." There's almost certainly more money spent on them...
I only have one computer connected to my cable modem. It's an old NT box. It happens to have two nics in it, though, and it serves the rest of the house. But I do in fact only have one computer connected to the cable modem. What I do with my own internal network is my business!
Columbine Families Play the Blame Game
The families of several victims of the 1999 Columbine High School shootings file a $5 billion lawsuit against 25 video game publishers, including Nintendo, Sega, Sony, id Software, and GT Interactive.
Wow, I'd never even heard about this. Anyone know how it turned out? I wonder if I can sue these companies for causing me to waste my life away in front of a television...
No, this is a really good idea!
Remember when you were a little kid, and your friends would do things to annoy you? Eventually, you learned that if you ignore them instead of reacting, they would leave you alone, because they didn't get the reaction they wanted.
America is remembering the lessons we learned as little kids. Instead of getting all huffy-puffy about the buildings being knocked down, we'll just completely erase all memories of them!
Bin Laden: Haha, America! I knocked your shit down!
America: Huh? There were never any buildings there in the first place. Notice this flight simulator from 2000. There are just blank spots where you claim there were some "buildings."
Bin Laden (exasperated): I... HATE... YOU!!!!
Clearly, we can win by not giving him the satisfaction of thinking he did anything.
I'm really glad to see that gopher is alive and kicking. Not only that, but you can still search gopherspace using Veronica!
Personally, I think it's much better than the web.
But can you backtrack through a google cache? pointym5 writes "Checked out the ZeoSync web site lately?
No, you can't backtrack through a google cache, but you can backtrack through the Web Archive's caches and they do have one link to Zeosync's website from July of 2001. Of course they didn't seem to have links to all those people back then, either.
The poll is still available here . It carries no warnings or disclaimers that the poll has been massively rigged by Microsoft.
.Net by a factor of three in this poll. By early January, the position had reversed; the results are shown here. An investigation indicated that Microsoft employees used vote-rigging to distort the results. The full story can be found here.
Looks like they read your comment. They've added a disclaimer:
On 21 December, ZDNet posted a story reporting the preliminary results of this poll, which showed a large majority of respondents who said they planned to deliver applications via Web services by the end of 2002 favoured Java for the job. At the time, Java outranked
When I was a child, watching falling stars with my dad, I voiced a concern that one might hit me. He put one of those "happy birthday" paper party hats on my head, and called it an asteroid detection system.
Confused, I asked him how it worked. He said, "When the hat is crushed by an asteroid, there's an imminent danger!"
I find it very annoying to try to install Microsoft patches. I work in a place where I am responsible for several windows installations. When I install a M$ OS, in order to patch it, i have to:
1. Start IE (click through internet connection wizard)
2. Open the windows update website
3. Download an activeX application to determine what updates I need
4. Download and install the updates (often, more than 5!) one at a time, rebooting in between each one!
It's so much easier to swivel my chair around to my redhat box and do a simple 'up2date -i'.
I wonder if there's any particular reason why Microsoft makes it so difficult? Do they actually like their security holes?
New York-based Take-Two Interactive Software Inc. said on Wednesday it plans to modify the hit criminal adventure game so that it could be sold in Australia by January.
This will be great! I bet GTA3 will be even better when they cut out the parts that involve stealing cars and killing people!
Wrong - use your head man. If all of AT&T's customers used 100% their cable modem's capacity 24 hours a day, you would not be getting broadband for $40 a month.
He didn't say he wanted to use his maximum cablemodem bandwidth constantly - he said he expected the 128k he was guaranteed. By my calculations, that's less than 1/12th of the bandwidth of a T1.
What should be in the the TOS of cable companies is total bandwidth allocation. In Austin, Time Warner has nothing like that in their TOS. However, if you use "too much," they will shut you down and make you call in to have the service turned back on. When we asked how much was "too much," they wouldn't tell us - because they want the right to make arbitrary decsions.
A friend of mine tried to determine the maximum upstream bandwidth allowed before a customer is marked as "bad." I forget the exact numbers, but it was something like 10 gigs up in a month could cause your service to be shut off... I could do that with a 56k modem!
The computer that reads and encrypts the message should be a laptop, running on battery power, in a room completely shielded from RF inteferance. Don't forget about the Tempest attack.
I think that if the FBI tried hard enough, they'll always be able to get at your data. And what if they decide to start watching little old me, who isn't actually doing anything illegal, and therefore doesn't take such security precautions? Don't I still have a right to privacy?
A new video codec will boost performance 20 percent over current-generation video codecs, and will enable the playback of high-definition 720 x 1,280 progressive scan video at 24 frames per second, said Will Poole, vice president of the Windows Digital Media Division of Microsoft. Using Windows Media's 4-to-1 compression ratio advantage over MPEG-2, "studios could put all the Godfather movies or an entire musician's discography on a single CD," said Poole.
Ok, I might believe that windows media compresses 20% better than DVD. But I refuse to believe that using windows media format, you can fit ALL the Godfather movies on ONE CD.
Godfather 1: 175 minutes
Godfather 2: 200 minutes
Godfather 3: 170 minutes
Total = 545 minutes. Even on a 700 meg CD, that's 1.28 megabytes per minute for audio and video, or 23 KILOBYTES per second. . I wonder how good that's gonna look?
"Junis's e-mail -- routed to Kabul, then Islamabad, then London" is not the way it would go - if I remember correctly, the main Pakistani bandwidth goes via Singapore. Unless Katz means this email was sent to someone in Kabul who forwarded it to someone etc etc etc.
In which case I'd hazard a guess to say the first passing was on paper, not electronically.
No. Actually, it does appear to go through london.
...
8 gbr1-p70.auttx.ip.att.net (12.123.133.22) 11.641 ms 10.797 ms 8.374 ms
9 gbr4-p10.dlstx.ip.att.net (12.122.2.109) 6.448 ms 7.822 ms 6.348 ms
10 gbr3-p60.dlstx.ip.att.net (12.122.1.137) 5.109 ms 6.612 ms 6.426 ms
11 gbr4-p40.attga.ip.att.net (12.122.3.38) 20.097 ms 31.047 ms 36.354 ms
12 gbr4-p10.wswdc.ip.att.net (12.122.2.162) 51.647 ms 48.060 ms *
13 gbr3-p60.wswdc.ip.att.net (12.122.1.129) 51.222 ms 51.025 ms 51.342 ms
14 gbr3-p20.n54ny.ip.att.net (12.122.3.53) 58.926 ms 59.912 ms 57.151 ms
15 * gbr1-p100.n54ny.ip.att.net (12.122.1.150) 59.479 ms 58.959 ms
16 t2a1-p4-0-0.us-ny.concert.net (192.205.32.74) 71.585 ms 84.599 ms 92.313 ms
17 t1c1-ge6-0.us-ny.concert.net (166.49.224.1) 214.112 ms 263.098 ms 285.189 ms
18 t2c1-ge7-0.us-ny.concert.net (166.49.224.43) 95.119 ms 95.564 ms 111.339 ms
19 t2c1-p2-0.uk-lon2.concert.net (166.49.164.45) 180.919 ms 158.820 ms 165.064 ms
20 t2a3-ge5-0-0.uk-lon2.concert.net (166.49.176.19) 167.730 ms 168.101 ms 179.358 ms
21 166.49.218.158 (166.49.218.158) 507.199 ms 494.285 ms 451.786 ms
22 islamabad-gw1.comsats.net.pk (210.56.8.1) 334.508 ms 319.926 ms 351.413 ms
I think I prefer spam to snail mail advertisements. At least with spam I can just hit the delete key. And even though spammers whine about the fact that they are paying for the spam to be delivered, I guess I'm in the minority in that my ISP's bill doesn't go up every month depending on the number of spams I get
Now don't get me wrong, I still hate spam in my inbox, but at least these people aren't cutting down trees to clutter my physical space with their message - information that if I wanted, I could go out and get myself!
From the initial information, which is quite sparse, this doesn't follow the pattern of the earlier terrorist attacks. If it crashed while it was comming in for a landing, it would do much less damage, because I assume it would have much less fuel. Also, if you have control of an airplane, why not ram it into a tall building instead of some houses?
Of course we know so little at this point, speculating seems pointless..
From the NYTimes article:
In a joint statement, the networks said the device ``violates the rights of copyright owners in unprecedented ways'' and ``deprives the copyright owners of the means by which they are paid for their creative content and thus reduces the incentive to create programming and make it available to the public.''
This little box is violating their rights? It's an inanimate object - it can't! Much like the saying, guns don't kill people, people kill people.... I wish these industry types would get it through their heads that its their customers who are supposedly violating their rights, not some box. Rather than attacking the box, they should try to jail their customers who illegaly copy stuff.