I am a volunteer with the SES (Australian state emergency service, similar to civil defense agencies) and we still use pagers (as well as text messages, which also get forwarded to email!). My pager is made by Motorola.
Although it is more convenient to just carry a mobile phone, there is a danger that text messages if the network is congested for there to be a significant (and sometimes detrimental) delay. On two occasion last year or early this year, texts didn't get delivered for a whole day. Pagers are instant, but if your pager is not in a reception area (in a tunnel or whatever) then there is the danger of completely missing the message.
Anyway, paging services are usually independent of telecoms.
I agree that most people don't understand the concept. But there is an "advantage" to "water powered" or more accurately, hydrogen powered vessels (yes, it includes boats). There is a proposal by a company in Australia to build a hydrogen powered trawler because it is possible to load it with sufficient hydrogen to go out on their fishing trips, they can top up their supply (not indefinitely) using solar panels, and teh initial load is generated from renewable sources. It's an intriguing concept because they realise the limitation of battery storage. You see, in effect, it's an electric trawler, but with a "battery" that can last months.
You have no idea how big and sparsely populated this country is do you? Think the population of New York spread across the continental US. In some places, you can drive for an hour or more before getting from one populated town (a few hundred) to another town (a few hundred).
Assuming that 1 tonne = 1000kg, this machine requires approximately 1 kilowatt hour of electricity to remove 10kg of Carbon Dioxide from the atmosphere. How efficient is this?
"For home energy use, carbon dioxide emissions vary widely from state-to-state and from day-to-day. The national average is about 1.3 pounds of carbon dioxide for every kilowatt-hour of electricity used in your home."
Not bad. If it really works, you can redirect 10 to 15% of your electricity to achieve Carbon neutrality.
I work for the market leader in air handling technologies for power stations and such, and recently we were talking about this problem. We obviously want to grow as a company, and the CEO was explaining this technology to us and how we'll hopefully be involved. The cost is prohibitive (unless the consumer is willing to pay). It is estimated that 20% of a coal fired power station will need to be used to clean it's CO2. This is not an insignificant amount. It also means that we will need to build some more power stations than is needed by consumet demand just to power these devices. Until politicians and the public accept that cleaning up the atmosphere is not going to be cheap or free, then you will not see these devices anywhere.
That means they have to translate the manuals, and that they need to provide French-language technical support.
I'm sorry, but this is such a lame excuse. I have worked with translation agencies for technical manuals. A single skilled translator can do a full 100 page manual in a week. Considering how "hardware" doesn't change by any significant stretch of the imagination to make the translation one did for one model completely different to another model meaning that the translations will be re-hashed manuals anyway. As for support: wouldn't they already have a support centre covering the frensh speaking world (there a lot outside of Quebec)? I'm not Canadian, and I don't work for Dell. I don't know why they'd not release a product in Canada at the same time they do in the US, but it's not a language issue.
I am a "volunteer" in a State Emergenccy Service (similar to Civil Defence org) in Australia where we are the "statutory authority" during storms, floods, etc, and in an Emergency, the person in charge of the local area has the authority to declare an evacuation. In that case, the Police who "report" to the SES during such an emergency, will forcibly remove people. Now in 99% of cases, sensible people tend to move when they are told to anyway, so force is not required. The system works when there is a very clear demarcation of responsibilities and command structure.
I worked for HP Services for quite a number of years in the Asia Pacific region. I was one of the "outsourced" guys. For one customer where HP was the full outsource partner, there were around 200 IT staff for a company of around 8000 staff. This included, server, sales, desktop and managerial support (but not security, which was in house of about 20 people). There was another measure within the IT Department (or HP in this case) of how many "support" staff per field/development/support/actual IT staff. For this particular customer, the ratio was about 1 to 7. That is 1 non-IT-handson or admin person for every 7 IT hands on person. This customer was also always in the green (meet SLAs consistently) in the whole AP region. This was the gold standard where other customers were measure against. Within the IT outsource environment, the 1 to 7 ratio was never beat, and one of the worst performers was almost 1 to 1. Their SLAs were not as good either.
The point I'm trying to make, is that, there also needs to be proper management within IT departments, not just the company as a whole.
When i was in the US a few years ago, I was assoyed that they didn't have "transit" any more (I was only flying to Canada). Anyway, because of this "no transit" thing, and the the dodgy United Airlines, I missed my connection flight, and had to fly somewhere else as a workaround. While I was in line to go through the security check, everyone in front of me were taking their shoes off. I decided not to unless they asked me to. I walked right through, no one asked me anything.
I am not only of "Middle Eastern" appearance, I am middle Eastern, and have the accent to go along with it. It's all a sham security.
I worked for HP for several years, so this is personal experience. For a High Tech company, they are still extremely retarded in the way they handle things. Here are some examples: Leave application forms. Go to a website, fill in a form and then print it and fax it to your manager. There is no way to "submit" the form to a database which then emails the manager. I was probably one of the first people to print-to-pdf and email it instead.
Procurement: Once when I moved roles within HP, I needed to order a laptop. So I ordered a laptop, docking station, and carry case. These were standard laptops. The order processing centre was located in Singapore or Malaysia, and so the laptop, the docking station and the carry case were air freighted to me from Singapore even though my office was about 5 Kms from their Warehouse in Sydney.
It's hard to believe that management didn't care that a single employee was the only one who knew anything about critical infrastructure, no matter whether the employee arranged things this way because he thought no-one else was good enough or because this was his was of becoming entrenched.
I find that easy to believe. Even easier to believe that they didn't know this was the case, or knew but did not understand.
It's not actually the case of people not knowing the passwords or such, from what I've read in the news sources, it looks like he's locked out the other people who should have access. Think of him as a an admin who either changed the passwords of all the other admin users or deleted their accounts.
There is a tendency in the US and in some other countries with major problems, to avoid contact with "the enemy". Any one who suggests that it might be productive or useful or helpful or whatever to try and talk to the "enemy" is quickly shot down as "unpatriotic". I remeber hearing on the news how Barak Obama suggested that he's willing to talk to the Iranians, and he uickly had to retract those remarks because of the outcry. Most people (and country leaders) just want respect. One shows respect not by ignoring the others, but by engaging them.
I grew up in the town where his parents (the Dabaghi's which was later anglicised to DeBakey) came from in South Lebanon.
When I was still in that town, over 30 years ago he was a very famous man in that (his family is a big part of town as well) and in the sixties when he visited his relatives there was accorded great honours.
Anyway, I reckon his fame and his ability to achieve great things were great conributing factors that lead many people in that town to also emigrate to US and also achieve many great things as US citizens.
It shows that migrants are able to contribute considerably t their adoptive society than most people fear.
If I run a grocery store, I'm allowed to say what kinds of checks I'll take.
This would only be a problem if you're the only, or largest by a very very large margin (an almost monopoly). But that's only the half of it. Like another poster has said, the analogy is more akin to you saying that people who buy groceries will have to pay by cheque, and then implement a system where if people pay by cheque then there is a cheque processing fee. This is essentially what eBay was trying to do.
Why is it that whenever Nukes and black market is mentioned, Iran gets a mentioned but some dodgy US allies don't? The powers that be in the US seem hell bent on describing Iran as a rogue state or worse and "evil" state. They continuously ignore the fact that it was a US ally who started all this Nuclear Weapons Export business. After all, it was the Pakistanis who sold the tech to other countries.
From my experience, Iran is less of a threat than Pakistan. You see, Iran is big on hype and words and gesturing. Pakistan on the other hand is fueling the growth of radical Islam all over the place. Check with the British about their bombers.
I Have not changed my mind. I may use one, but I will always prefer to read a "dead tree" book. I love building my library of books. Some I even read again once in a while.
There is a sense of achievement when sitting in the living room surrounded by bookshelves full of varied book. Besides, they are always a conversation starter when I get visitors.
Here in Australia, the census workers (mainly temporary workers, like election monitors) walk around every 5 years and drop off a census form. The resident will then fill in the form (mainly demographic data), and on a certain day, the forms will be collected or you can post them.
Within a year, the results of the census are available in meaningful forms.
Last census, a year or so ago cost us about $300 million (that's about $15 per person of population) which also includes the year spent processing the raw data.
Just what we need, another vigilante group patrolling the intertubes. As if the americans didn't have enough of these already. Could you please elaborate on how you define the FBI, AFP, NZP, RCMP and the Scotland Yard as vigilantes?
It is really frustrating the kind of responses to this kind of story. I wonder what the slashdot troll would write when or if this agency manages to arrest a nasty spammer. My guess it'll probably be in the YRO section decrying the freedom to spam.
makes it even worse. It should be opt-in. How many people will be too embarrassed, or too shy to call up and opt-out or not want their name recorded as a potential Pr0n lover..... If parents want the service, they should be able to call and opt-in, but don't make the default mode censorship.
I was not going to reply because the general gist of such discussions tends to be: if you support censorship, then you're a moron, and if you don't then you're the enlightened person. This comment however summarised what this whole debate (on Slashdot) has degenerated to - a farce by most respondents. I'll address this post first; How many ISP do you think will hire more staff to "take the calls"? Or do you think the dude in the video shop looking at the X rated movies will be embarrassed? A few others are addressing the various bypass technologies, filtering is not to outsmart people like that. Filtering is for people who want one less thing to worry about. I have a netgear router that has keyword filtering. It's a pain to keep the keywords up to date. I can bypass it if I need to; same thing for the filter, but it's further upstream. I love it and look forward to it being available to me.
Anything with more than 5 megapixels needs digital image stabilization - otherwise your extra resolution will be smeared out by natural shaking of your hands (or even your tripod - but this takes effect later). Similarly large "tele" zoom is useless - if you zoomed in 10x closer to your subject you have 10 times the effect of shaking (and thus need a good tripod or very short exposure time).
I'm not sure what led you to make these statements, but I have a 8.2MP camera, and I take good pictures with minimal shake or fuzziness. Granted, I'd like to get a stabilised lens because it'll give me more options, but I'm not waiting until then to take good photos. Fuzziness and resolution are independent. Resolution is directly related to the size of the printout without zooming or to cropping. The higher the resolution, the larger the printout you can have. 5MP is great resolution for standard photo printouts or screen resolution, but when you start cropping you start losing resolution.
Email is not what people are after. Dopn't get me wrong, people want to send and receive email. That's a no brainer, but, there are a myriad to clients out there that do the job quite well. Some of the clients are stand-alone and some are web based. Some of the clients also offer a "calendar" where you can store events. However, what the world needs (to avoid Microsoft's dominance) is a shared calendaring system integrated into the same email client. I use Outlook at work. At the end of the day, I care nothing what I use to send emails with, but I do care that I can view others' calendars in Outlook, and that I can send them invites and see if they've got something in the calendar or not. That is what many people are looking for, not another email client. This will never happen on the client side if there is no server backend to manage the data and the sharing permissions. If you build it, people will come. My two cents.
It's not DoS, it's by Court Order that shut it
on
WikiLeaks Under Fire
·
· Score: 2, Informative
The case was brought by lawyers working for a Swiss bank A controversial website that allows whistle-blowers to anonymously post government and corporate documents has been taken offline in the US. Wikileaks.org, as it is known, was cut off from the internet following a California court ruling, the site says.
The case was brought by a Swiss bank after "several hundred" documents were posted about its offshore activities. Apparently offshore mirrors are still available.
Most of the time there at that customer's site was with Compaq prior to its takeover by HP; so maybe the 1.5 year average for HP still holds. The decision was made by HP management for a HP (not Compaq) product.
Slashdot Mirror
I am a volunteer with the SES (Australian state emergency service, similar to civil defense agencies) and we still use pagers (as well as text messages, which also get forwarded to email!). My pager is made by Motorola.
Although it is more convenient to just carry a mobile phone, there is a danger that text messages if the network is congested for there to be a significant (and sometimes detrimental) delay. On two occasion last year or early this year, texts didn't get delivered for a whole day.
Pagers are instant, but if your pager is not in a reception area (in a tunnel or whatever) then there is the danger of completely missing the message.
Anyway, paging services are usually independent of telecoms.
I agree that most people don't understand the concept. But there is an "advantage" to "water powered" or more accurately, hydrogen powered vessels (yes, it includes boats).
There is a proposal by a company in Australia to build a hydrogen powered trawler because it is possible to load it with sufficient hydrogen to go out on their fishing trips, they can top up their supply (not indefinitely) using solar panels, and teh initial load is generated from renewable sources.
It's an intriguing concept because they realise the limitation of battery storage. You see, in effect, it's an electric trawler, but with a "battery" that can last months.
You have no idea how big and sparsely populated this country is do you?
Think the population of New York spread across the continental US. In some places, you can drive for an hour or more before getting from one populated town (a few hundred) to another town (a few hundred).
I work for the market leader in air handling technologies for power stations and such, and recently we were talking about this problem. We obviously want to grow as a company, and the CEO was explaining this technology to us and how we'll hopefully be involved.
The cost is prohibitive (unless the consumer is willing to pay).
It is estimated that 20% of a coal fired power station will need to be used to clean it's CO2. This is not an insignificant amount. It also means that we will need to build some more power stations than is needed by consumet demand just to power these devices.
Until politicians and the public accept that cleaning up the atmosphere is not going to be cheap or free, then you will not see these devices anywhere.
I'm sorry, but this is such a lame excuse. I have worked with translation agencies for technical manuals. A single skilled translator can do a full 100 page manual in a week. Considering how "hardware" doesn't change by any significant stretch of the imagination to make the translation one did for one model completely different to another model meaning that the translations will be re-hashed manuals anyway.
As for support: wouldn't they already have a support centre covering the frensh speaking world (there a lot outside of Quebec)?
I'm not Canadian, and I don't work for Dell. I don't know why they'd not release a product in Canada at the same time they do in the US, but it's not a language issue.
I am a "volunteer" in a State Emergenccy Service (similar to Civil Defence org) in Australia where we are the "statutory authority" during storms, floods, etc, and in an Emergency, the person in charge of the local area has the authority to declare an evacuation. In that case, the Police who "report" to the SES during such an emergency, will forcibly remove people. Now in 99% of cases, sensible people tend to move when they are told to anyway, so force is not required.
The system works when there is a very clear demarcation of responsibilities and command structure.
I worked for HP Services for quite a number of years in the Asia Pacific region. I was one of the "outsourced" guys. For one customer where HP was the full outsource partner, there were around 200 IT staff for a company of around 8000 staff. This included, server, sales, desktop and managerial support (but not security, which was in house of about 20 people). There was another measure within the IT Department (or HP in this case) of how many "support" staff per field/development/support/actual IT staff. For this particular customer, the ratio was about 1 to 7. That is 1 non-IT-handson or admin person for every 7 IT hands on person. This customer was also always in the green (meet SLAs consistently) in the whole AP region.
This was the gold standard where other customers were measure against.
Within the IT outsource environment, the 1 to 7 ratio was never beat, and one of the worst performers was almost 1 to 1. Their SLAs were not as good either.
The point I'm trying to make, is that, there also needs to be proper management within IT departments, not just the company as a whole.
When i was in the US a few years ago, I was assoyed that they didn't have "transit" any more (I was only flying to Canada). Anyway, because of this "no transit" thing, and the the dodgy United Airlines, I missed my connection flight, and had to fly somewhere else as a workaround.
While I was in line to go through the security check, everyone in front of me were taking their shoes off. I decided not to unless they asked me to. I walked right through, no one asked me anything.
I am not only of "Middle Eastern" appearance, I am middle Eastern, and have the accent to go along with it.
It's all a sham security.
I worked for HP for several years, so this is personal experience.
For a High Tech company, they are still extremely retarded in the way they handle things.
Here are some examples:
Leave application forms. Go to a website, fill in a form and then print it and fax it to your manager. There is no way to "submit" the form to a database which then emails the manager. I was probably one of the first people to print-to-pdf and email it instead.
Procurement: Once when I moved roles within HP, I needed to order a laptop. So I ordered a laptop, docking station, and carry case. These were standard laptops. The order processing centre was located in Singapore or Malaysia, and so the laptop, the docking station and the carry case were air freighted to me from Singapore even though my office was about 5 Kms from their Warehouse in Sydney.
It looks like they found a large amount of cash (about $11000) on him, so they deemed him a flight risk. Bump up the bail so he can't go anywhere.
It's not actually the case of people not knowing the passwords or such, from what I've read in the news sources, it looks like he's locked out the other people who should have access. Think of him as a an admin who either changed the passwords of all the other admin users or deleted their accounts.
There is a tendency in the US and in some other countries with major problems, to avoid contact with "the enemy". Any one who suggests that it might be productive or useful or helpful or whatever to try and talk to the "enemy" is quickly shot down as "unpatriotic".
I remeber hearing on the news how Barak Obama suggested that he's willing to talk to the Iranians, and he uickly had to retract those remarks because of the outcry.
Most people (and country leaders) just want respect. One shows respect not by ignoring the others, but by engaging them.
I grew up in the town where his parents (the Dabaghi's which was later anglicised to DeBakey) came from in South Lebanon.
When I was still in that town, over 30 years ago he was a very famous man in that (his family is a big part of town as well) and in the sixties when he visited his relatives there was accorded great honours.
Anyway, I reckon his fame and his ability to achieve great things were great conributing factors that lead many people in that town to also emigrate to US and also achieve many great things as US citizens.
It shows that migrants are able to contribute considerably t their adoptive society than most people fear.
This would only be a problem if you're the only, or largest by a very very large margin (an almost monopoly).
But that's only the half of it. Like another poster has said, the analogy is more akin to you saying that people who buy groceries will have to pay by cheque, and then implement a system where if people pay by cheque then there is a cheque processing fee. This is essentially what eBay was trying to do.
Why is it that whenever Nukes and black market is mentioned, Iran gets a mentioned but some dodgy US allies don't?
The powers that be in the US seem hell bent on describing Iran as a rogue state or worse and "evil" state. They continuously ignore the fact that it was a US ally who started all this Nuclear Weapons Export business. After all, it was the Pakistanis who sold the tech to other countries.
From my experience, Iran is less of a threat than Pakistan. You see, Iran is big on hype and words and gesturing. Pakistan on the other hand is fueling the growth of radical Islam all over the place. Check with the British about their bombers.
I Have not changed my mind. I may use one, but I will always prefer to read a "dead tree" book. I love building my library of books. Some I even read again once in a while.
There is a sense of achievement when sitting in the living room surrounded by bookshelves full of varied book. Besides, they are always a conversation starter when I get visitors.
A file on a computer does not compare.
Sure. Just visit their website and fill in an online complaint
Amen to this. Go back please. (Buttons are almost as big as this comment if it was just the first 3 words)
It does look like a lot...
Here in Australia, the census workers (mainly temporary workers, like election monitors) walk around every 5 years and drop off a census form.
The resident will then fill in the form (mainly demographic data), and on a certain day, the forms will be collected or you can post them.
Within a year, the results of the census are available in meaningful forms.
Last census, a year or so ago cost us about $300 million (that's about $15 per person of population) which also includes the year spent processing the raw data.
It is really frustrating the kind of responses to this kind of story. I wonder what the slashdot troll would write when or if this agency manages to arrest a nasty spammer. My guess it'll probably be in the YRO section decrying the freedom to spam.
I was not going to reply because the general gist of such discussions tends to be: if you support censorship, then you're a moron, and if you don't then you're the enlightened person.
This comment however summarised what this whole debate (on Slashdot) has degenerated to - a farce by most respondents.
I'll address this post first; How many ISP do you think will hire more staff to "take the calls"? Or do you think the dude in the video shop looking at the X rated movies will be embarrassed?
A few others are addressing the various bypass technologies, filtering is not to outsmart people like that. Filtering is for people who want one less thing to worry about.
I have a netgear router that has keyword filtering. It's a pain to keep the keywords up to date. I can bypass it if I need to; same thing for the filter, but it's further upstream. I love it and look forward to it being available to me.
I'm not sure what led you to make these statements, but I have a 8.2MP camera, and I take good pictures with minimal shake or fuzziness. Granted, I'd like to get a stabilised lens because it'll give me more options, but I'm not waiting until then to take good photos.
Fuzziness and resolution are independent. Resolution is directly related to the size of the printout without zooming or to cropping. The higher the resolution, the larger the printout you can have. 5MP is great resolution for standard photo printouts or screen resolution, but when you start cropping you start losing resolution.
Email is not what people are after. Dopn't get me wrong, people want to send and receive email. That's a no brainer, but, there are a myriad to clients out there that do the job quite well. Some of the clients are stand-alone and some are web based.
Some of the clients also offer a "calendar" where you can store events.
However, what the world needs (to avoid Microsoft's dominance) is a shared calendaring system integrated into the same email client. I use Outlook at work. At the end of the day, I care nothing what I use to send emails with, but I do care that I can view others' calendars in Outlook, and that I can send them invites and see if they've got something in the calendar or not. That is what many people are looking for, not another email client.
This will never happen on the client side if there is no server backend to manage the data and the sharing permissions.
If you build it, people will come.
My two cents.
The case was brought by lawyers working for a Swiss bank
A controversial website that allows whistle-blowers to anonymously post government and corporate documents has been taken offline in the US.
Wikileaks.org, as it is known, was cut off from the internet following a California court ruling, the site says.
The case was brought by a Swiss bank after "several hundred" documents were posted about its offshore activities. Apparently offshore mirrors are still available.
Most of the time there at that customer's site was with Compaq prior to its takeover by HP; so maybe the 1.5 year average for HP still holds. The decision was made by HP management for a HP (not Compaq) product.