My experiences with WIMAX trials in Hamilton, Ontario were disappointing. What I don't know is whether the problems were entirely WIMAX specific, or if the provider, Primus Canada, just never managed to configure things properly.
In any event now that I'm back with DSL and Cable I can really appreciate the lack of latency. No more of the giant lag with every web qaccess.
"I'm thinking of sticking RFID tags on some and trying to triangulate a position with several tranceivers placed in the house. (Does) anyone have any suggestions(?)"
When you have people over for a dinner party, turn off the speaker that says "PLEASE RETURN TO THE STORE!"
Guess what - a computer that old that doesn't run commonly used software (in others, MS Office, and an up to date web browser) is of no more interest to most non-profit groups that it is to you. They can buy a new system for $500 and likely have no interest in whatever ancient laptops are cluttering up you garage.
If you can't think of a use for it, and you can't think of anyone in your immediate circle that would want it, then it's better to pass it on to whatever group in your town can at least take a stab at recycling it.
Fora small operation you really need to teach people to have reasonable expectations. Ten spam per day in your in box? Fifty? One Hundred?
Figure out what's a reasonable number and teach people that it's just one of those things that they'll need to deal with. No-one should expect that they'll never see any spam, or that no false positives will ever happen.
Whatever solution you choose make sure that there's a fast and easy way to search the filtered mail. At one point my former webhost switched spam filtering systems, and suddenly the only way to look for falsely tagged messages was to scroll through pages and pages of messages.
I missed the chance for an obvious Bush joke, so in all seriousness....
I moved about a month ago, and still haven't unpacked my printers. I think I printed three or four pages on a friend's printer last month, but that's it.
Virtually everything that I do these days is electronic - letters, ordering, resumes, photos - you name it. The only times that I print anything are handouts for meetings once in a long, long while, and drafts of really important proposals where I find that actually reading them off paper helps me to see errors and omissions.
My kids use significantly more of my stationary than I do.
They expect to rely heavily on Soyuz spacecraft once the shuttles are retired in 2010.
I'd say they have damn little choice.... Yeah I'm old enough to remember Mercury, Gemini and Apollo. I seriously doubt that there's one person in Washington DC today that has a tenth of that kind of vision.
What are supposed to be "developing" nations are heading to space, and the U.S. doesn't seem to have a clue that they're being left behind.
... if so many developers weren't so goddamned arrogant in their refusal to take even basic steps to make sites accessible, then perhaps there would have been no need for government to create things like the ADA to legislate it.
Did she mention that there are a whole army of grandmothers out there trading copyrighted sewing machine embroidery patterns by e-mail? Disney has in fact busted a few of them from time to time.
My ex-mother-in law collected 500+ 3 1/2" floppies full of designs before we bought her a CD burner. No-one has enough grandhildren to use that many designs!
Oh Boy - here come the endless "we should do THIS" scenarios.... we should pay for each e-mail... we should all whitelist... we should throttle how many messages a person can send each day... we should outlaw webmail like Yahoo or Gmail...
Problem is that none of them really will work in the Real World (RW).
In the RW people like webmail. In the RW people like to change e-mail addresses, or create new ones for specific needs. In the RW some people like "real" e-mail, downloaded to a local PC, and others like Google or Yahoo or Hotmail and keeping everything on the host server.
In the RW a lot of people and businesses send a lot of bulk e-mail, very legitimate opted-in e-mail. In the RW a lot of people get important messages from entirely new people, people who haven't been whitelisted, and who are unlikely to bother going through the whole "If you want to e-mail me you need to click the link below and prove that you exist" process. After all, clicking links in e-mail is something that we teach people to NOT do.
And in the RW the spammers always stay one step ahead of the ISPs and mail providers anyhow.
No, what's needed is a real ground-up redesign of how e-mail works. we need something that encompasses the ease of current POP/IMAP/Webmail services, but which somehow includes ways to authenticate and/or block mail without user intervention, and which does so with near perfect reliability. And which maintains some backwards compatibility for at least a few years.
Adding more hoops or captchas or whitlelists to the existing mail sysytems just isn't going to solve the problem.
... from a real office into a cube, and now I'm all pissed off 'cause when I was higher up the food chain I crapped on all of the cube dwellers. Now I'm gonna be one of them and frankly it doesn't look good.
If I had half a brain I'd have treated these folks with respect, or at least would now be trying to make a few friends, but frankly I am just so superior that I can't be bothered. I'm sure that they all resent me -- excuse me -- are envious of me -- and that they are just lying in wait to steal my stuff (OK, it's the company's stuff, but hey it's got MY porn on it, so that's like it's mine) and probably spit on my keyboard and give some horrible cube dweller disease.
So I'm taking preemptive action by bitching and moaning about how everyone else here is dishonest. That way maybe they'll be scared to mess with my stuff, cause everybody knows that I'm on to them.
For some time now I've been taking part in WIMAX trials here in Hamilton Ontario. This too was trumpeted as a glorious thing that would change the face of our city, bring us into the high tech 21st century etc.
In practice although WIMAX seems to work OK (aside from a real lag much of the time, which may just be bad server configuration by Primus Communications), My sense is that the company isn't really committed to it. I doubt that there will be a serious public roll out.
The idea seems great - a wireless Internet connection that works wherever you are. The reality seems a bit less rosy, and my guess is that a city wide wireless network will need a good level of customer support - not Primus' strong point by a long shot.
For some time now I've been taking part in WIMAX trials here in Hamilton Ontario. This too was trumpeted as a glorious thing that would change the face of our city, bring us into the high tech 21st century etc.
In practice although WIMAX seems to work OK (aside from a real lag much of the time, which may just be bad server configuration by Primus Communications), My sense is that the company isn't really committed to it. I doubt that there will be a serious public roll out.
The idea seems great - a wireless Internet connection that works wherever you are. The reality seems a bit less rosy, and my guess is that a city wide wireless network will need a good level of customer support - not Primus' strong point by a long shot.
Anyone else amused that one of the biggest selling points of new Intel Macs is the ability to run Windows and access all of the programs that aren't available on the Mac?
Two and half years into owning a G4 Powerbook I've concluded that Macs are no more or less irritating*, crash prone**, or prone to dumb design ideas*** than are PCs. They just incorporate different irritations, ways of crashing, and dumb design choices.
I've given the Mac a good run, and arguably am more knowledgeable than most users. I have taken the time to understand the ways that things work on the Mac. I doubt that I would buy another.
* No Delete key, but a key marked "delete" which actually backspaces. Yes, I know there is some multiple key combination that will delete stuff, but I still believe that pressing a key marked "delete" should cause things to be deleted.
** "Kernel Panic" is exactly the same as the "Blue Screen of Death". In my experience the Mac crashes more often than my XP machine. And then there have been programs that just stop working for no apparent reason.
*** The Dock irritates me no end on this small 12" screen. I'll take the Windows task bar any day. Simpler is better. It also drives me crazy that the Mac defaults to leaving all apps running forever instead of shutting them down when you click the "close" button.
In an age of cable and satellite everything, it's often assumed that antennas are a thing of the past, or are limited to cheap Chinese rabbit ears.
Think again. While living in Appalachian Kentucky we found that the Radio Shack FM antenna on the roof did an amazing job of pulling in radio stations. Some times the old tech is the best tech.
Having spent too many hours dealing with increasingly bizarre authentication schemes at various web sites, and more hours reading about each new form of high tech security wizardry, I've come to conclude that an awful lot of companies are ignoring the obvious - that the only really secure way to protect data is to prevent physical access to it.
As long as someone can get access to the container, they can find a way in.
Obviously we're balancing convenience with security, but when some employee takes your whole customer database off-site on his laptop your problem is not encryption, it's keeping that data in a controlled environment.
Surely with all of that intense technology eldavojohn or Time could have figured out that coal mining stopped back in 1938 in Nanaimo. Since then it is primarily known for being one of the finest examples of really bad urban planning, for at one time having more square feet of shopping mall per capita than any place else on earth, and of course for theNanaimo International Bathtub Race.
To quote Ember Swift: "This is the city that Engineers enter to demonstrate just how not to build a city centre This is the city used as a symbol of haste. "
Women are inundated with astrological nonsense from fashion magazines, so it is normative for them to believe it even if they are otherwise highly logical.
a) Stupid
b) sexist
c) offensive
d) all of the above
Slashdot Mirror
My experiences with WIMAX trials in Hamilton, Ontario were disappointing. What I don't know is whether the problems were entirely WIMAX specific, or if the provider, Primus Canada, just never managed to configure things properly.
In any event now that I'm back with DSL and Cable I can really appreciate the lack of latency. No more of the giant lag with every web qaccess.
Now we know why NASA and the US aren't bothering with a replacement for the Shuttle - they'll just have returning astronauts skydive back to earth!
Instead of cheaping out spend $30 a month for your own cable or DSL connection. Or, as many have suggested, just talk to the guy.
Barring that just connect the 220v dryer line to the wall socket in his room and hope that he got his power bar for $5.99 at WalMart.
Or even better please all of your room-mates and just move.
Deliver it by hand.... if you're lucky they'll give you one of those cool attache cases that handcuffs to your wrist.
"I'm thinking of sticking RFID tags on some and trying to triangulate a position with several tranceivers placed in the house. (Does) anyone have any suggestions(?)"
When you have people over for a dinner party, turn off the speaker that says "PLEASE RETURN TO THE STORE!"
Guess what - a computer that old that doesn't run commonly used software (in others, MS Office, and an up to date web browser) is of no more interest to most non-profit groups that it is to you. They can buy a new system for $500 and likely have no interest in whatever ancient laptops are cluttering up you garage.
If you can't think of a use for it, and you can't think of anyone in your immediate circle that would want it, then it's better to pass it on to whatever group in your town can at least take a stab at recycling it.
Fora small operation you really need to teach people to have reasonable expectations. Ten spam per day in your in box? Fifty? One Hundred?
Figure out what's a reasonable number and teach people that it's just one of those things that they'll need to deal with. No-one should expect that they'll never see any spam, or that no false positives will ever happen.
Whatever solution you choose make sure that there's a fast and easy way to search the filtered mail. At one point my former webhost switched spam filtering systems, and suddenly the only way to look for falsely tagged messages was to scroll through pages and pages of messages.
I missed the chance for an obvious Bush joke, so in all seriousness....
I moved about a month ago, and still haven't unpacked my printers. I think I printed three or four pages on a friend's printer last month, but that's it.
Virtually everything that I do these days is electronic - letters, ordering, resumes, photos - you name it. The only times that I print anything are handouts for meetings once in a long, long while, and drafts of really important proposals where I find that actually reading them off paper helps me to see errors and omissions.
My kids use significantly more of my stationary than I do.
As a conversation on Slashdot grows longer, the probability of comparing someone to or bashing Microsoft approaches 1.
"Longer" of course is defined as beyond "FRIST POST!"....
They expect to rely heavily on Soyuz spacecraft once the shuttles are retired in 2010.
I'd say they have damn little choice.... Yeah I'm old enough to remember Mercury, Gemini and Apollo. I seriously doubt that there's one person in Washington DC today that has a tenth of that kind of vision.
What are supposed to be "developing" nations are heading to space, and the U.S. doesn't seem to have a clue that they're being left behind.
... if so many developers weren't so goddamned arrogant in their refusal to take even basic steps to make sites accessible, then perhaps there would have been no need for government to create things like the ADA to legislate it.
Did she mention that there are a whole army of grandmothers out there trading copyrighted sewing machine embroidery patterns by e-mail? Disney has in fact busted a few of them from time to time.
My ex-mother-in law collected 500+ 3 1/2" floppies full of designs before we bought her a CD burner. No-one has enough grandhildren to use that many designs!
Oh Boy - here come the endless "we should do THIS" scenarios.... we should pay for each e-mail... we should all whitelist... we should throttle how many messages a person can send each day... we should outlaw webmail like Yahoo or Gmail...
Problem is that none of them really will work in the Real World (RW).
In the RW people like webmail. In the RW people like to change e-mail addresses, or create new ones for specific needs. In the RW some people like "real" e-mail, downloaded to a local PC, and others like Google or Yahoo or Hotmail and keeping everything on the host server.
In the RW a lot of people and businesses send a lot of bulk e-mail, very legitimate opted-in e-mail. In the RW a lot of people get important messages from entirely new people, people who haven't been whitelisted, and who are unlikely to bother going through the whole "If you want to e-mail me you need to click the link below and prove that you exist" process. After all, clicking links in e-mail is something that we teach people to NOT do.
And in the RW the spammers always stay one step ahead of the ISPs and mail providers anyhow.
No, what's needed is a real ground-up redesign of how e-mail works. we need something that encompasses the ease of current POP/IMAP/Webmail services, but which somehow includes ways to authenticate and/or block mail without user intervention, and which does so with near perfect reliability. And which maintains some backwards compatibility for at least a few years.
Adding more hoops or captchas or whitlelists to the existing mail sysytems just isn't going to solve the problem.
... from a real office into a cube, and now I'm all pissed off 'cause when I was higher up the food chain I crapped on all of the cube dwellers. Now I'm gonna be one of them and frankly it doesn't look good.
If I had half a brain I'd have treated these folks with respect, or at least would now be trying to make a few friends, but frankly I am just so superior that I can't be bothered. I'm sure that they all resent me -- excuse me -- are envious of me -- and that they are just lying in wait to steal my stuff (OK, it's the company's stuff, but hey it's got MY porn on it, so that's like it's mine) and probably spit on my keyboard and give some horrible cube dweller disease.
So I'm taking preemptive action by bitching and moaning about how everyone else here is dishonest. That way maybe they'll be scared to mess with my stuff, cause everybody knows that I'm on to them.
For some time now I've been taking part in WIMAX trials here in Hamilton Ontario. This too was trumpeted as a glorious thing that would change the face of our city, bring us into the high tech 21st century etc.
In practice although WIMAX seems to work OK (aside from a real lag much of the time, which may just be bad server configuration by Primus Communications), My sense is that the company isn't really committed to it. I doubt that there will be a serious public roll out.
The idea seems great - a wireless Internet connection that works wherever you are. The reality seems a bit less rosy, and my guess is that a city wide wireless network will need a good level of customer support - not Primus' strong point by a long shot.
For some time now I've been taking part in WIMAX trials here in Hamilton Ontario. This too was trumpeted as a glorious thing that would change the face of our city, bring us into the high tech 21st century etc.
In practice although WIMAX seems to work OK (aside from a real lag much of the time, which may just be bad server configuration by Primus Communications), My sense is that the company isn't really committed to it. I doubt that there will be a serious public roll out.
The idea seems great - a wireless Internet connection that works wherever you are. The reality seems a bit less rosy, and my guess is that a city wide wireless network will need a good level of customer support - not Primus' strong point by a long shot.
Anyone else amused that one of the biggest selling points of new Intel Macs is the ability to run Windows and access all of the programs that aren't available on the Mac?
Two and half years into owning a G4 Powerbook I've concluded that Macs are no more or less irritating*, crash prone**, or prone to dumb design ideas*** than are PCs. They just incorporate different irritations, ways of crashing, and dumb design choices.
I've given the Mac a good run, and arguably am more knowledgeable than most users. I have taken the time to understand the ways that things work on the Mac. I doubt that I would buy another.
* No Delete key, but a key marked "delete" which actually backspaces. Yes, I know there is some multiple key combination that will delete stuff, but I still believe that pressing a key marked "delete" should cause things to be deleted.
** "Kernel Panic" is exactly the same as the "Blue Screen of Death". In my experience the Mac crashes more often than my XP machine. And then there have been programs that just stop working for no apparent reason.
*** The Dock irritates me no end on this small 12" screen. I'll take the Windows task bar any day. Simpler is better. It also drives me crazy that the Mac defaults to leaving all apps running forever instead of shutting them down when you click the "close" button.
In an age of cable and satellite everything, it's often assumed that antennas are a thing of the past, or are limited to cheap Chinese rabbit ears.
Think again. While living in Appalachian Kentucky we found that the Radio Shack FM antenna on the roof did an amazing job of pulling in radio stations. Some times the old tech is the best tech.
Having spent too many hours dealing with increasingly bizarre authentication schemes at various web sites, and more hours reading about each new form of high tech security wizardry, I've come to conclude that an awful lot of companies are ignoring the obvious - that the only really secure way to protect data is to prevent physical access to it.
As long as someone can get access to the container, they can find a way in.
Obviously we're balancing convenience with security, but when some employee takes your whole customer database off-site on his laptop your problem is not encryption, it's keeping that data in a controlled environment.
Claim that your physics thesis uncovers corruption in the Bush administration and pass it on to Wikileaks!
Must be you - the whole things shows in my browser (Opwera/Mac) - both times.
Surely with all of that intense technology eldavojohn or Time could have figured out that coal mining stopped back in 1938 in Nanaimo. Since then it is primarily known for being one of the finest examples of really bad urban planning, for at one time having more square feet of shopping mall per capita than any place else on earth, and of course for theNanaimo International Bathtub Race.
To quote Ember Swift: "This is the city that Engineers enter to demonstrate just how not to build a city centre This is the city used as a symbol of haste. "
Yeah, but trust me, Kentucky's wine industry is not quite Napa valley yet....
"Tim Couch bans beer in all counties."
Too late. Almost half of Kentucky's counties (54 out of 120) are already dry. Well, except for the bootleggers and moonshiners.
Women are inundated with astrological nonsense from fashion magazines, so it is normative for them to believe it even if they are otherwise highly logical.
a) Stupid
b) sexist
c) offensive
d) all of the above