$.02 per msg for TXT received actually, they are probably alerts differently. You could try another SMS alert provider if that price is more agreeable. (And I checked Cingular is apparently charging the full $.10 send and receive.) Annoying to say the least.
I hear you about the ForecastFox, handy little toy.
Eh forgive me I was typing swiftly. Regardless they have unlimited domestic text mesaging I am not certain where you see $.5 to send. (They also have unlimited email), of course there are other problems with it (mostly that it requires another phone number and most people send texts to well the mobile phone number in thier phonebook, not some other random number.
(as for datasheet problem, try -ing the payment mediums (-paypal and -visa generally work), honestly though most places that sell components generally have the datasheet certainly mouser, jamco, and digi-key do.)
They don't get monthly billable credit to kids. They can't legally enter the contract. Generally what happens is they whine at (see convince) their parents to add a line (costs about $10/mo (eur 7.67)) to the parents credit based plan,. They are given a firm lecture that they will have to pay for anything they use (except of couse free nights and weekends, and free mobile to mobile that is pretty standard on these plans) over some number of minutes. Of course most of the parents probably have no idea of text messaging, so they probably don't even mention it.
Child then proceeds to go wild. (often times just with voice minutes, but that makes a poor article) Bill comes, grounding ensues.
Then you overpay by a good bit given the weakness of the dolar vs. the Euro. A single text message is $.1 or E.077 and there are several options for unlimited text messaging ranging from $10(E7.66) to ~$18(E13.79).
Really, $800/month to send what - at most, 10MB of data (can anyone actually enter that much data in one month using a mobile phone?) - over a wireless network is pretty pathetic.
$800 a month assuming it was all text messages (which the article says it wasn't, but still)
$.10 a message yields 8000 messages.
Per message limit of 160 according to the article (GSM is a bit higher IIRC) + Call it 40 bytes of header information 8000 * (160 + 40) = 1600000.
1024 bytes in a kilobyte. 1600000/1024 = 1562.5
1024 kb in a megabyte 1562.5/1024 = 1.53 MB
Or if you don't want to count header 1.22MB
Of course I am assuming they are using bytes and no compression. Actually Either figure would be a long novel so I doubt anywhere near that was sent. Some evil companies have a chat mode for SMS, where it looks like an IM convo and I could easily see that being mostly Hi, How are you? type stuff.
You are very silly and obviously never texted in your life. T9 means you tend to at least get the right start, and then it goes wild because they can't spell. Oh and you get that weird thing with on (and others) being replaced with no. I mean people will edit to make things shorter, but leetspeak takes way too much work.
Actually some massive(>75% IIRC) ammount of people take the standard deduction, which limits the ability to save. Of course complicated tax situation are a different kettle of fish, but most people have very simple sitatuions.
Well you should use your Safari and go see the rare, and wonderful FireFox remember, though shoot with a camera not a gun. It is a shame that getting to go on Safari is so expensive though. Oh well for most people going on Safari is something nice to try but you ride a firefox for life.
When I installed OS X it certainly did seem too or atleast it had one. I know because that is how I installed it on my Mac.
Thank you for the pointer to haxies, that shall make my life more tolerable. But it is fairly silly to have to do it. (and if you allow one free utility why not another).
Everyone of my aquantence runs Firefox. So desktop browser integration is not such a big thing. It suffices.
I will again grant you that the mac is a nice machine (though too enamoured of upgrades, both hardware and software). Spyware is after all merely applications written to be hard to remove and to do something, they are hard to remove through all the hooks an os can provide. Those hooks are as present in Mac OS X as they are in Windows (because being able to run something on startup is helpful, and being able to provide name finding services is helpful.) It would be funny if this little headless mac gave the impetous needed to visit spyware on the mac.
Actually on NTFS at least renaming doesn't kill shortcuts (actually you can rename while an application has locked a file). Just tested. honest. Even switching between local drives doesn't always kill it. (network drives are a different manner of course)
Searching is a funny story on Windows that is a fact, but there are a number of free utilities to fix it. (*nix searching is wonderful just in general of course, well supposing someone set it up right)
I find expose to be useless mostly because I open a *lot* of windows. Far too many. 17 running right now and I have gotten well over a hundred before, lots of very small windows with very small text all look alike honestly. Virtual desktops are handy for grouping things by task (which may involve many different applications, some of the applications will also be used at other tasks etc.) The hide to desktop thing is useful, but def something windows had first (I.E. 4.0 beta IIRC)
I mean raw work output productivity. Esp. in a corporate office envinroment, beating windows except in vertical markets is just hard.
Actually printing is one of the few things I find Windows does better then anything else. (*nix printing gives me nightmares it really does). Make sure the printer is being halted everytime she disconnects though. that does make a big difference. Also some printer companies seem to delight in over complicated drivers, make sure those are upgraded. In all honesty if Windows ships with drivers though they are probably better then anything the MFG makes.
I don't deny that Macs are nice machines, they are expensive (and churn through quasi-mandatory upgrade cycles too quickly), but they are nice machines, and if they can flatten out the upgrade cycle I might start recomending them to people. But if they can't run Apple's latest and greatest producitivity software on a 4 year old machine, then I can't recommend it, because I can be fairly certain that most of my non video game playing friends&family are going to be using (at least potentially) the same machine 5 or 6 years (though at that point it might be a child's machine) from now, and they are not going to want to be told they have to upgrade even then.
Apple is suposedly working on it, which is a good thing. One thing people should realize is that most home users wear out machines and they don't want to have to buy new ones or expensive upgrades to be able to surf the web and get email. Corp users like to be able to reuse machines too (if nothing else it means they get more for surplus), and OS upgrades are so discouraged that most companies will without hesitation install old software on new machines.
I know OS X doesn't rely on the console, when I say *nix, I meant non OS X *nix, sorry.
In all honesty most major applications have installers, mostly because it is simpler for users in the end.
Aliases/shortcuts autoupdate (when possible) in windows too.
Searching has been remedied by MSN desktop search. Not the best hack, but very nice in the end. (Google desktop search works great too but is a security nightmare)
What the mac does not have is: working home/end keys (at least not consistently), a high quality video player (windows media player may not be perfect but it works much better then quicktime), Proper and complete integration with windows networks (it works fine in small environments, ut becomes messy in larger environments). a consistent visual style (brushed metal is evil)
While the Mac is not a bad platform it is far from perfect, it has too many tech demo features (expose, cough), and while quite nice to use is not really more productive then Windows (Unix productiity depends mostly on your skill in working the console, and stringing together command invocations, you can do the same on any platform though since all the utilities are ported) Still a $500 Mac might help a few people, it just won't be something really recomendable as a techno-layman's primary computer (partly because of the $129 tax, considering I still get family and friends calls about copmuters that were *upgraded* to windows 98 it just isn't supportable)
There are times though that you just want to get on and play for 30 minutes, which isn't really time to get a group on, get out to a location, hunt, kill and get back.
RockBox already has a system sort of like this (as a Open source drop in replacement for some Archos HD based players, though they are working on flash as well). The problem is that it isn't perfect. Not even close. It is vital for blind and vissualy impaired users, but it is not something you are going to use often.
Big problems with voice based menus are: How should a small embedded device speak Sk8r Boi, or any number of odd ID3 tags?
Even the best Text to Speech systems sound fake, and they have a full computer to store samples and crunch data with.
An interface like the one you proposed would be nice for about half of the first time, a proper script would only tersey notate state changes, and certainly wouldn't give information on what button to press. (As for "Thank You Enjoy your music" Are you nuts?)
The Current prototype given doesn't seem to have the ability to do that (Though you could do a hold down play/pause thing to enter menu mode).
That doesn't mean a simple Auditory Interface might not be posible, (SOmething like [center hold press] "By artist" [center press] "A 2 artists " [Left press] "C 3 artists" [center press] "Cranberies - Zombie" [Center Press] |Playback Start|, with other options being By Title, By Album, etc. Of course if you let it sit on "A 2 artists" it should list the artists, and if there is only one artist it should either just say the artist or (prefferably) group it.
Indeed any large player (1 gig certainly) would require something better then just blind clicking. a 1 gig player would probably have an Apple listed capacity of 250 songs. So 124 max clicks if you know the sort 249 if you don't just to pick out one song. Also would it be in shuffle mode all the time or what, for a small player it doesn't really matter but with a large player it becomes quite important. If it has selectable shuffle mode, how would you enable shuffle mode.
As it stands though this is one device that Apple should shelve if the this is the best they can do. It is not innovative, and even with a voice interface it would still be annoying. The need for external cabling and the sheer stupidity of having firewire in a device that will have no need of it, make this rumor an unexciting one, but then again maybe it is time for Apple to do one of their slow suicide things again.
Clicking on someone you don't likes links might count as harrasment or (most likely) wrongful interference. Wrongful interference cases are not easy to make (and for good reason).
Legal action actually has a better chance here (it isn't something needing new or radical law, and unlike a spamer which hurts a lot people a very little, it is one person hurting another person a lot.) Most of the time people will be trying to directly enrich themselves (i.e. basically clicking on ads on their site to get money from it), which means they have a contract with Google and by undertaking that action they are breaching it. That is pretty easy to deal with. The malice cases are harder, but shouldn't pose that much trouble. Even international barriers aren't that big of a deal for Google as they are expanding into more and more countries they will be more capable of bringing suit against a company.
The real problem is detecting fraudulant clicks. An employee of one company clicking on any ads of a competitor just for fun is fairly hard to spot.
Actually you can just drag text over to a blank area and it will do a Google I'm feeling lucky on it (or more properly it will parse it just like you typed it in) . So highlight "lokitorrent" drag to blank tab bar area, and wait.
It is true that a certain ammount of "do or die" is/was needed to fight wars (nowadays war can be waged fairly well without rage, etc), but the planing and launching of wars is pretty much uniquely human, and a relatively modern phenomen at that. While war might have originated in battles for territory, war is much more deadly (for the losing side at least), and is waged in far larger groups.
Try AutoStreamer(site is down atm, but just google for download locations), it allows you to update your windows XP CD to have SP2 in the installation. The program is an extension of AutoPatcher which will fully update a system (and should be what you download and burn to a cd instead of trying to find everything on windows update) DL/Torrents for autopatcher
A lot of people like to use special user accounts for apache/db daemons, esp. in production environments. (Though there is some debate about this).
Oh well doesn't matter anyways. The proper way to handle such things is to make requests on paper, and with deadlines, you will either get what you need, or you will get root. (Truthfully if someones wants to maintain a server for me, handle backups, and manage security updates, well that isn't something I would complain about unless they didn't actually do it)
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Comparing to voice bandwidth needed is probably a fairer comparison.
.594 KBytes/s
Using the lowest rate stream of GSM, (4.75kbit/s)
4.75 / 8 =
Or about 2638.69 s. 43 Minutes of voice. Which even at really high (international roaming) rates probably wouldn't be more then $86
If take the more realistic case of Full rate GSM (13kbit/s). is 964.35 s or 16 minutes of voice which is pretty trivial.
But of course they are not charging you based on bandwidth. So in the end the comparisons aren't really fair.
$.02 per msg for TXT received actually, they are probably alerts differently. You could try another SMS alert provider if that price is more agreeable. (And I checked Cingular is apparently charging the full $.10 send and receive.) Annoying to say the least.
I hear you about the ForecastFox, handy little toy.
Eh forgive me I was typing swiftly. Regardless they have unlimited domestic text mesaging I am not certain where you see $.5 to send. (They also have unlimited email), of course there are other problems with it (mostly that it requires another phone number and most people send texts to well the mobile phone number in thier phonebook, not some other random number.
(as for datasheet problem, try -ing the payment mediums (-paypal and -visa generally work), honestly though most places that sell components generally have the datasheet certainly mouser, jamco, and digi-key do.)
They don't get monthly billable credit to kids. They can't legally enter the contract. Generally what happens is they whine at (see convince) their parents to add a line (costs about $10/mo (eur 7.67)) to the parents credit based plan,. They are given a firm lecture that they will have to pay for anything they use (except of couse free nights and weekends, and free mobile to mobile that is pretty standard on these plans) over some number of minutes. Of course most of the parents probably have no idea of text messaging, so they probably don't even mention it.
Child then proceeds to go wild. (often times just with voice minutes, but that makes a poor article) Bill comes, grounding ensues.
Then you overpay by a good bit given the weakness of the dolar vs. the Euro. A single text message is $.1 or E.077 and there are several options for unlimited text messaging ranging from $10(E7.66) to ~$18(E13.79).
Most companies in the US you don't get charged for receiving messages, (Though with one carier you have to pay to get text messages at all).
Oh and we do get charged if the letter is too heavy. (Though we are told the sender).
Only Tmobile of the big companies charges for incoming IIRC. and they charge .5 per msg so if you are balanced it comes out the same.
Really, $800/month to send what - at most, 10MB of data (can anyone actually enter that much data in one month using a mobile phone?) - over a wireless network is pretty pathetic.
$800 a month assuming it was all text messages (which the article says it wasn't, but still)
$.10 a message yields 8000 messages.
Per message limit of 160 according to the article (GSM is a bit higher IIRC) + Call it 40 bytes of header information 8000 * (160 + 40) = 1600000.
1024 bytes in a kilobyte. 1600000/1024 = 1562.5
1024 kb in a megabyte 1562.5/1024 = 1.53 MB
Or if you don't want to count header 1.22MB
Of course I am assuming they are using bytes and no compression. Actually Either figure would be a long novel so I doubt anywhere near that was sent. Some evil companies have a chat mode for SMS, where it looks like an IM convo and I could easily see that being mostly Hi, How are you? type stuff.
You are very silly and obviously never texted in your life. T9 means you tend to at least get the right start, and then it goes wild because they can't spell. Oh and you get that weird thing with on (and others) being replaced with no. I mean people will edit to make things shorter, but leetspeak takes way too much work.
OGO provides free SMS, and one IM service for 17.99.
Actually some massive(>75% IIRC) ammount of people take the standard deduction, which limits the ability to save. Of course complicated tax situation are a different kettle of fish, but most people have very simple sitatuions.
Or the official IRS (not just intuit) http://www.irs.gov/efile/article/0,,id=118986,00.h tml
Well you should use your Safari and go see the rare, and wonderful FireFox remember, though shoot with a camera not a gun. It is a shame that getting to go on Safari is so expensive though. Oh well for most people going on Safari is something nice to try but you ride a firefox for life.
office x, installed office X
When I installed OS X it certainly did seem too or atleast it had one. I know because that is how I installed it on my Mac.
Thank you for the pointer to haxies, that shall make my life more tolerable. But it is fairly silly to have to do it. (and if you allow one free utility why not another).
Everyone of my aquantence runs Firefox. So desktop browser integration is not such a big thing. It suffices.
I will again grant you that the mac is a nice machine (though too enamoured of upgrades, both hardware and software). Spyware is after all merely applications written to be hard to remove and to do something, they are hard to remove through all the hooks an os can provide. Those hooks are as present in Mac OS X as they are in Windows (because being able to run something on startup is helpful, and being able to provide name finding services is helpful.) It would be funny if this little headless mac gave the impetous needed to visit spyware on the mac.
Actually on NTFS at least renaming doesn't kill shortcuts (actually you can rename while an application has locked a file). Just tested. honest. Even switching between local drives doesn't always kill it. (network drives are a different manner of course)
Searching is a funny story on Windows that is a fact, but there are a number of free utilities to fix it. (*nix searching is wonderful just in general of course, well supposing someone set it up right)
I find expose to be useless mostly because I open a *lot* of windows. Far too many. 17 running right now and I have gotten well over a hundred before, lots of very small windows with very small text all look alike honestly. Virtual desktops are handy for grouping things by task (which may involve many different applications, some of the applications will also be used at other tasks etc.) The hide to desktop thing is useful, but def something windows had first (I.E. 4.0 beta IIRC)
I mean raw work output productivity. Esp. in a corporate office envinroment, beating windows except in vertical markets is just hard.
Actually printing is one of the few things I find Windows does better then anything else. (*nix printing gives me nightmares it really does). Make sure the printer is being halted everytime she disconnects though. that does make a big difference. Also some printer companies seem to delight in over complicated drivers, make sure those are upgraded. In all honesty if Windows ships with drivers though they are probably better then anything the MFG makes.
I don't deny that Macs are nice machines, they are expensive (and churn through quasi-mandatory upgrade cycles too quickly), but they are nice machines, and if they can flatten out the upgrade cycle I might start recomending them to people. But if they can't run Apple's latest and greatest producitivity software on a 4 year old machine, then I can't recommend it, because I can be fairly certain that most of my non video game playing friends&family are going to be using (at least potentially) the same machine 5 or 6 years (though at that point it might be a child's machine) from now, and they are not going to want to be told they have to upgrade even then.
Apple is suposedly working on it, which is a good thing. One thing people should realize is that most home users wear out machines and they don't want to have to buy new ones or expensive upgrades to be able to surf the web and get email. Corp users like to be able to reuse machines too (if nothing else it means they get more for surplus), and OS upgrades are so discouraged that most companies will without hesitation install old software on new machines.
I know OS X doesn't rely on the console, when I say *nix, I meant non OS X *nix, sorry.
In all honesty most major applications have installers, mostly because it is simpler for users in the end.
Aliases/shortcuts autoupdate (when possible) in windows too.
Searching has been remedied by MSN desktop search. Not the best hack, but very nice in the end. (Google desktop search works great too but is a security nightmare)
What the mac does not have is: working home/end keys (at least not consistently), a high quality video player (windows media player may not be perfect but it works much better then quicktime), Proper and complete integration with windows networks (it works fine in small environments, ut becomes messy in larger environments). a consistent visual style (brushed metal is evil)
While the Mac is not a bad platform it is far from perfect, it has too many tech demo features (expose, cough), and while quite nice to use is not really more productive then Windows (Unix productiity depends mostly on your skill in working the console, and stringing together command invocations, you can do the same on any platform though since all the utilities are ported) Still a $500 Mac might help a few people, it just won't be something really recomendable as a techno-layman's primary computer (partly because of the $129 tax, considering I still get family and friends calls about copmuters that were *upgraded* to windows 98 it just isn't supportable)
There are times though that you just want to get on and play for 30 minutes, which isn't really time to get a group on, get out to a location, hunt, kill and get back.
Basically, certainly a stupid patent, but under current law Eolas has a decent case. It is an incredibly stupid patent though.
RockBox already has a system sort of like this (as a Open source drop in replacement for some Archos HD based players, though they are working on flash as well). The problem is that it isn't perfect. Not even close. It is vital for blind and vissualy impaired users, but it is not something you are going to use often.
Big problems with voice based menus are:
How should a small embedded device speak Sk8r Boi, or any number of odd ID3 tags?
Even the best Text to Speech systems sound fake, and they have a full computer to store samples and crunch data with.
An interface like the one you proposed would be nice for about half of the first time, a proper script would only tersey notate state changes, and certainly wouldn't give information on what button to press. (As for "Thank You Enjoy your music" Are you nuts?)
The Current prototype given doesn't seem to have the ability to do that (Though you could do a hold down play/pause thing to enter menu mode).
That doesn't mean a simple Auditory Interface might not be posible, (SOmething like [center hold press] "By artist" [center press] "A 2 artists " [Left press] "C 3 artists" [center press] "Cranberies - Zombie" [Center Press] |Playback Start|, with other options being By Title, By Album, etc. Of course if you let it sit on "A 2 artists" it should list the artists, and if there is only one artist it should either just say the artist or (prefferably) group it.
Indeed any large player (1 gig certainly) would require something better then just blind clicking. a 1 gig player would probably have an Apple listed capacity of 250 songs. So 124 max clicks if you know the sort 249 if you don't just to pick out one song. Also would it be in shuffle mode all the time or what, for a small player it doesn't really matter but with a large player it becomes quite important. If it has selectable shuffle mode, how would you enable shuffle mode.
As it stands though this is one device that Apple should shelve if the this is the best they can do. It is not innovative, and even with a voice interface it would still be annoying. The need for external cabling and the sheer stupidity of having firewire in a device that will have no need of it, make this rumor an unexciting one, but then again maybe it is time for Apple to do one of their slow suicide things again.
Clicking on someone you don't likes links might count as harrasment or (most likely) wrongful interference. Wrongful interference cases are not easy to make (and for good reason).
Legal action actually has a better chance here (it isn't something needing new or radical law, and unlike a spamer which hurts a lot people a very little, it is one person hurting another person a lot.) Most of the time people will be trying to directly enrich themselves (i.e. basically clicking on ads on their site to get money from it), which means they have a contract with Google and by undertaking that action they are breaching it. That is pretty easy to deal with. The malice cases are harder, but shouldn't pose that much trouble. Even international barriers aren't that big of a deal for Google as they are expanding into more and more countries they will be more capable of bringing suit against a company.
The real problem is detecting fraudulant clicks. An employee of one company clicking on any ads of a competitor just for fun is fairly hard to spot.
Actually you can just drag text over to a blank area and it will do a Google I'm feeling lucky on it (or more properly it will parse it just like you typed it in) . So highlight "lokitorrent" drag to blank tab bar area, and wait.
The R-Complex? Reptiles don't start wars.
It is true that a certain ammount of "do or die" is/was needed to fight wars (nowadays war can be waged fairly well without rage, etc), but the planing and launching of wars is pretty much uniquely human, and a relatively modern phenomen at that. While war might have originated in battles for territory, war is much more deadly (for the losing side at least), and is waged in far larger groups.
Try AutoStreamer(site is down atm, but just google for download locations), it allows you to update your windows XP CD to have SP2 in the installation. The program is an extension of AutoPatcher which will fully update a system (and should be what you download and burn to a cd instead of trying to find everything on windows update) DL/Torrents for autopatcher
A lot of people like to use special user accounts for apache/db daemons, esp. in production environments. (Though there is some debate about this).
Oh well doesn't matter anyways. The proper way to handle such things is to make requests on paper, and with deadlines, you will either get what you need, or you will get root. (Truthfully if someones wants to maintain a server for me, handle backups, and manage security updates, well that isn't something I would complain about unless they didn't actually do it)